Wolf dreams

The  blood flows as current
through and around the brain
spilling into empty as I lay
down to sleep.

We say-Wheels Spin-
is this where we begin and end
that recapped thought, witticism, and dig
deeper as I have a conversation
with self, explaining
why Ezra Pound is not
considered
an American Hero-
although I fancy the lad,
I now understand and so
much evil clumps in corners
the sealed eyes squeeze and fold in
the car repair for son, the phone for daughter
colleges, dinners, stories and towels-
so many towels-folded, washed,
thrown down, tossed, appropriated in the rain,
picked up-creamer but forgot the bunnies
and the pain better not grow or settle down-
the ER is not OK today, I am OK, I say,
I am, I am, I am, I am, I am, I am
hear-not here,
my body belies deep breathing
and I still think
I sleep
too much.



Painting by Albert Joseph Moore (1875) in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

The Poet's Dream-by P.B. Shelley

The Poet's Dream 

by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

On a poet's lips I slept

Dreaming like a love adept

In the sound his breathing kept;

Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses,

But feeds on the aerial kisses,

Of shapes that haunt thoughts wildernesses. 

He will watch from dawn to gloom

The lake reflected sun illume

The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom

Nor heed nor see, what things they be;

But from these create he can

Forms more real than living man,

Nurslings of immortality!

One of these awakened me,

And I sped to succour thee.

Image of painting by Jozef Israëls [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Vestigial Flexing

With these tiny words
trickling over my skin,
these pithy lines I draw and scratch,
in my head from tucked deep in bed,
in broad strokes that spasm and spark-
streaking in wisps that leave light trails,
I am comforted and swaddled
by my brittle skin that knows these
are the strands that connect my spirit
to its terminal boundaries.
This is how I speak to me.
I say to hear, I think to find
the same self, tucked in amid
its ways of saying untranslatable
and delectable daunting poetry.

The heavy blanket protects me from
exposure- you cannot see more
than the shape of naked, the outline
is enough for some, sameness...
There is That, This is I, There, There.
I've found just
in another beating heart
that echoes
Thou art That-
Art Thou That?

I wonder, I think
it is warm around you too...
I must be closer to your world in words
or I am sleeping tight inside definitions
sweet dreams, where these words want me
passionately and privately
for their own subversive desires...
I listen intensely and densely rapt-
catching any waves of sound
that may keep me afloat, on the
shiny surface of sonorous daylight
hours, too conscious to care
any more to day.




Image of painting by Alexey Gavrilovich Venetsianov, Sleeping Girl, 1840 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.