My seventeen inch diameter dream
What it was about?
It was about seventeen inches in diameter.
If dreams were pizzas that would be huge.
But it was auditory,
no visuals, no tastes, no smells.
It simply stated, 'I am a seventeen inch diameter dream.'
Maybe it was trying to tell me to expand
my horizons, be more ambitious,
engage with the world.
Seventeen inches.
What kind of measure is that
for your dreams?
dreamscapes
cascading
down the mud slide through the woodland towards the lake, you say you don’t know this place. I say we’ve walked here many times. it was our haunt before the world became a long lost dream.
our viewpoint is an empty space of light. we whisper. echoes eddy round the walls, up arched windows, reverberate from crystal glass. our silvery footsteps click off jade and turquoise floors.
we admire the waterfalls. rapids plunging from nowhere to nowhere. excited people surf on boards, white spume flying. they must be mad, we say, to take such risks. but this, after all, is their world.
seemingly solid fragments of fragility hide everywhere, ghosts in places we once knew, we are no longer in the picture. all disappears except for light and we slip out of frame, into silent thought, cascading
Straws in the Wind
Ah, there were auguries, auspices
there were hints, there were heralds
and why did they take no notice;
the young and the old?
Divinations they said.
All fled before war.
There were warnings and wives tales
prophesies and bodings
and how could they fail
to recognise these things?
Superstitions they cried.
All fled before pestilence.
There were forecasts and foreshadowings
there were harbingers and tokens
inklings, intimations,
seers and folk songs.
Thus they dismissed it.
All fled before famine.
There was money, science, strategies galore,
escape plans and dreams
but just as before,
they were merely wild schemes.
Fighting for their final breath.
All fled before death
the white, the red, the black and the pale
And all through history you'll find
retold, this age old tale
They fled before us like straws in the wind.
The Orangutan in the room
She was clearly going to wreck the place
swinging from lampshade to curtain rail
a full-toothed grin on her excited face
but when she grabbed the budgie I turned pale
like a child she put it straight to her mouth
and I rushed to get the poor bird back
only she was no youth
I gave her a smack
she went berserk and made for the door
into the garden
well before
I could close it
and there she was staring down at me
with her usual grin
from the topmost branch of the tree
I couldn't win!
So I lay on the lawn
where the grass grew deep
and gave a long yawn
and fell fast asleep
I woke and felt a heavy weight
upon me but a soft embrace
long arms enfolding me like fate
warm breath and familiar face
and it seemed to me,
meant to be
I had denied the orangutan
was part of me
Time Travel
I wonder, watching shadows shift,
shimmer across mirrors and walls,
is my armchair a time machine?
Nightfall crows gather in gloaming
under the salted vault of sky;
the stars that made my marrow.
Ceiling, floor, walls disintegrate,
peeling, wheeling away. Reeling,
I contemplate time’s template.
I hear the seugh and roar of it;
moments passing by my ears,
the jangle of eternity's strange music.
Within this luscious wilderness
of consciousness I wait my fate.
On the woven tarot of cosmic cloth.
I am a moth, fluttering towards
light, laundering its reality,
the white sheets of dawn.
An Ordinary Day
I couldn't call the register
they wouldn't settle down.
Our gardener had dug a pond
right outside our back door.
The drizzle's turned to purple snow.
It's killing all the ducks.
I know that when I'm wide awake
none of this will be true.
Something about this inner life
feels incredibly real.
Why would it make a difference
that I open my eyes?
Sometimes I just worry that
my mind is losing me.
Lesson of the Dark
What is the dream that haunts the hunter,
the dream that stalks the night?
It’s always been here and there,
subconsciously, even in daylight.
It slips past your defences, under
your radar, unknown, quiet but quite
intractable, undetectable, a thunder
cloud, gathering in your every thought.
No cell, no synapse is sacred. It saunters
through childhood memories, plunders
love’s lost images, deep fears wrought
from insecurities, things chewed over
a billion times, bitter battles fought,
faults, unresolved flaws you cover
and it never gives up. Behold the emperor
of dark recesses. The hideous haunter,
the hunter in your head. Your truth. All yours.
Munch had it right
They laid Richard over a horse and
nobody heard him scream,
like Cook in Hawaii
or the victims of climate change
or aircrash passengers
folk reduced to ash;
all dreams turn to screams.
The internal combustion engine became
an external threat and nobody
screamed enough.
In the sixties you couldn't hear the music
sometimes for the screams.
The first mobile phones cried blankly
'Has anybody seen my scream?'
Not yet. Not without a screen!
Complete ceasefire,
a thing of desire
in seventies Ulster
and all the world over,
anything to replace the screams.
Munch had it right.
Birth to death.
Life comes a-screaming at you!
The Curtain Falls
Is it the bird song brings the day
or the day that brings birdsong;
bending sound and bending light
lifting a new horizon up upon a skein of sky?
The silky assonance of morning
milks the milky way of stars that dance
down to soft day’s dawning
and yawning, half asleep, we keep
our treasured dreams dangling on lax strings,
flaccid puppets peeping through the curtain
of the future, all uncertain, barely glimpsed.
I ask the nightingale about the dreams it weaves.
I ask a lark about the dreams it wakes.
Both of them say a song is just a song.
Paws for Thought
I wish I could sleep
as a cat sleeps
all soft and paws
the whole being
an entity of pause
I wish I could sleep
like that – like a cat.
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