Apology for Good Dream
Soul Train
Hickey, Cheerful Salesman
Sorry. Once I could not believe in dreams, and
this error pervaded
my posture until
I became
bed-ridden, sored-over & someday sleep slid down to me from
the stalactites
(in which I also had not believed)
So, here was sleep, as though my duration had been labor––
contraction, space
between––
& here: the birth of sleep: conceived in the dream/death of another,
& here: were
conceived
My own dreams, my good dream beginning, the many crust-eyed conclusions:
*
This was the good
dream.
There was an ocean there. An ocean or a large lake at least,
wearing the land like a weave. On that land a horse
approaches the brim drawing a funeral carriage. From here
you can see the two lines the carriage cuts behind it
in the mud & grass of the dream, remember? There is no driver.
The animal goes, wood, wheeled, full of imps. They make noise
no man would know, for this noise––like bona fide laughter,
our big sobs––is an emotion explicitly alien. So forget about
it already.
It’s a good dream. One cannot see inside the shellacked carriage.
Inside the carriage is the mayor. His head is a half a cheeseburger.
He was bitten to death by a birthday girl and it shows in her
intestines, confetti. From here you can hear whispered humming.
“Poor Mayor,” you write, though he served the city of the
appetite
as well as one could. A bun’s in the oven, a puck’s on the
griddle,
the caravan cuts into the pool like a paddle. The trade winds
churn the condiment malodor. The dandy stars charge.
It is snowing shiny paper. On each flake a different letter.
On each letter a peculiar breeze. On each breeze the same letter.
Don Cornelius, we wish there were a channel
with nothing but crying or someplace like
Sesame Street but where they tear the words
to flour & every puppet has his arm up a man.
I wish there were a fog pillar here that could
levitate the remote in a translucent purple.
It would be nice to awaken one morning with
“What are all these white people doing in my house?”
Don Cornelius, the people assert themselves
into a scrupulous derangement, arranged
fisheyed around our lens, which sits in this den,
as I sit, toe to throat, smothered in comforter.
For something viral, Don, has happened its way
into my left lung. Something very sexy is
bound to occur in your coalcar, what with
the buttock bloom & thrusts touching.
I would touch myself but I’m afraid. A bandage
Would have to be broken. Could I keep these
Combos down? They made fine fire goggles after
I sucked them. I could see the fire.
Sometimes the whole hospital blistered,
these weren’t dancing circumstances.
Sometimes ice died, died in plastic
pouches on my painted chest. Oftentimes
A train could be understood as trembling
the readout. Must be nice, my friend, to have only
to unlatch the windows & doors, swipe them open,
blow out each ash from your tubular home.
There’s enough soil in my soulpatch
to make me remind myself of zombie
birth if I let it. Don’t. You’ve just been
very tired lately, considering science.
Your letter to the President raised some
pertinent points, some of which he’ll be sure
to bring up at the next cabinet meeting.
Thank you for your citizenship. Sincerely
there’re enough shells in my Santa to make me
remarkable: mandible, manimal––
these from the Himalayas, these from the floors
of three oceans: laughing ocean, hot ocean,
and the ocean. Once I conjured a Neptune
laugh. There’re enough lice
in my Van Dyke to accept them as more
than visitors, this is symbiosis:
what I provide (humid thatch)
should be obvious, and they provide
me the satisfaction of providing such.
([There are these moments, though, of self
doubt and horror, such as when an exercise
bike really turned me on. Or when I could
not remember where I hid the fork.
Or when I dreamed my way into Moss
Cottage complete with pansy executioners.]
They are too small to tell where,
metamorphically, they are, I say larvae,
or else pupa. Maybe pupa. Yet to begin to bite)
There are too many scars under my handlebar
to pluck it: kissing scars, kissing dog scars,
kissing Orca scars. And worst:
the missing lip. There’s an Aesop or an Ahab
in my left muttonchop who has yet to learn
to talk. He has his own lesson. Don’t listen,
though his Afropuff puffs an inch from your ear.
You’ve just been very automatic
lately, entering these scores into the idea
machine, subject to its radiance,
these scientific scores. It is hard for you
to see what these have to do with moving,
your right lambchop quickly quells
any solitary strands, strands that fill holes,
holes that could have been anything
given gods of their own or absent language.