dream – Page 2 – poems 2 die for

OVERLOOKED

I awake
fresh from nightmare

lost my way in a city
of memory spiralling upwards
into the mountains
totally transformed beyomd
all that I
can remember
wanting
to get home
needing to get home

but no sense of direction
as with every step
I climb higher
and higher
passing a giant cathedral
like structure, itself
like a mountain with
a trio of spires as
its peaks, its pinnacles

all the wonder
I should feel submerged
by the fear

and no way of phoning you
because I am
out of reception, do
not have
your number
so far for you
to drive
in the night to
collect me

your death three years ealier
somehow dream- forgotten
crucially overlooked

TANTAMOUNT

I stumble
into the temple
past
the guards
and moneylenders
who appear
not to notice

my, how fruitful and prosperous
— a billion, trillion times fold

since
the time of Jesus

and there
in the inner sanctum
I behold a trinity
Pennywise, Baron
Harkonnen
and the hydra-
headed great
of Merkava

brooding on something
hatching their joint scheme

lucky, in fact,
our blessed fortune,
that all this
amounts to
all this
be tantamount to
is a
meaningless dream.

FALTERED

his fingers faltered
that one
writing the script

and so best sibling
stepped into
replace him

but that one
not
weaned
the same

was of outlook
whole different genre

and so the dream
disappeared, we
became awake

congratulated ourselves
on
the end
of the fiction, red
pill reality

but it was
embedded level
of dream
and
move into nightmare

FELLOWS

is dream
about the dreamer

or the dream?

Kurt Godel
Zhuangzi
               Mauritz
Escher
         Italo
          Calvino

help
   me out
fellows    please re-
        direct me

sorry to
name-drop

this very thought
has got me tongue-
twisted lost
in the
labyrinth
that is the brain

and one if not
all of you

may just have the key

WATER MOCCASIN

I waa thinking
of a dream poem
about a new
dream body

when all of a sudden
a mud-coloured water moccasin
broke through the surface
of my flow
alerting me to
the inescapable nature of entropy
and the primeval structure
of my being

and here the skunk odours
of this approaching viper
alerted me
at once to the dingy, tawdry, drab
undercurrents
of all life

and so
I sensed it best to put
all dream-minded thoughts
on hold, let
them back burn for
the night

water mocassin gliding
effortlessly by
not as ornery a reptile
as is
the reputation.

CHANNELING

a pretty derelict
unused space now
(like an
interstellar void)

but once
tge SkyVue drive in
used to cover
acres of territory

and the bush under the screen
where as kids
we played
cowboys
and savages

remember that screen
well it used
to fill half the night sky

saw Spartacus there, and
Cast a Giant Shadow

which wars, it seems,
never really died

Rome always lingering
Empires of Man versus
Empires of Heaven

but now
the whole planet
is our
screen

we have screens in our pockets
screens in our heads
inescapable
channeling

and there enough projection
to fill every known desert
desert of the real
Neo

truth having
dissolved, truth crucified
by fiction

truth’s fate to be enslaved
by the narrative of the day

and like
the poem says we
have all
become cyphers, organic
little molecules
in the dance of supreme fiction

the new reality to be
broadcast twenty-
four seven

dreamworld Neo, germane to
the Zhuangzi parable

cowboys, savages, think
like
a butterfly

the wild gift of technology
the premise to allow

without any
lingering sense of irony

to speak of self as supreme,
and, yes indeed, the world

.

ALIGNED

ALIGNED cannot escape it this recurrent nightmare wandering lost around a campus looks like every university I ever taught ever studied at looks nothing vaguely like any of them at all and where is my time-table, my course guide, my GPS nothing in this scary dream line working like clockwork siderial-aligned and my classroom, when I get there, terminally empty an easier death metaphor would be so hard to find

JUKEBOX

JUKEBOX

we had love
hard and soft love together

in my dreams
or maybe
your dream

difficult to say
how must claim authorship,
location and territory

so receptive our separate states
given you
had been studying a
painting by Miro,
I, for my part, reading
Neruda

poetry from a time when
Communism was sexy
full of the surreal
and carnival
potential

and Professot Slavoj Zizek,
archetype of
Lacanian pessimist

was young in years, wet
behind the ears

little more to speak of
than mere
slip of a
Slovenian lad

Prince’s sign of the times

        song on
the jukebox before
                              we
did
   our dance