Dream aged seventeen

 Last  night I dreamt of antlers

They were balancing in the air hovering

Like a plane the positive and negative effects of time

I searched a house in my dream

Looking for something from my childhood

And I couldn't find it

Then in a hole in the wall plaster

I saw a legoman

I picked it up and examined it

The more I looked at the face the more I saw my own

I was holding myself as a boy

Or as a plastic man perhaps

A toy man

I put the legoman back in the hole in the wall

Then at the bottom of the stairs I saw the stag

It turned away quickly and I rushed downstairs to follow it

It had disappeared

But there appeared another door I had not seen before

One down below into a basement, like a coal cellar perhaps

I opened it and walked down the stairs

The light was dim,

Some torches on the wall

Were flickering casting long shadows

The stairs seemed to be sandy and made of stone

And gradually I realized I was walking beneath 

What must have been a pyramid

On the cellar floor was a table with a desk lamp on it

I recognized it from my study in my old home

Then in the shadow of the corner beside the stone staircase

Came a groan and a chinking of chains

A dark figure was rising from a crouching position

"Who are you?!", I screamed!

But the figure did not answer

Then suddenly he lurched forward 

in an attempt to capture me with his arms outstretched

I leaped back in the nick of time and he missed me, but could

go no further forward on account of being chained to the ground

To all intents and purposes

The creature seemed a spitting image of Frankenstein's monster

Complete with bolts in his neck

Different pieces of men sewn together to make a whole

He was wailing and moaning

And I felt sure he would break free any moment

And tear me to shreds

I looked around at what was in the vicinity for a weapon

There were archaelogists tools for digging, trowels mostly 

and a spade

I picked a trowel and waiting my moment

I threw it like a dagger and it stuck in his heart

dreams

 Oh my heart's on the wet stone

And my sorrow's the leaves

And I'm feeling so all alone

And I yet I have to believe

We all were made of bone

To dust we must cleave

The love of another one

Is just only too brief

I've been searching in the gutters

and the streams

And I hear someone mutters

Their life dreams

Looking in the river of stars

That gleam

And in the windows of cars

That beam

Searching for some pity in this town

Searching up and searching down

Looking for some pity in this city

But what I find is mean, lacking dignity

What has happened to the dreams of the man

Who writhes around drinking from a cider can

What is there in life to which he clings

Life to him seems a wretched thing

Can you spare him a look

Can you give to her a book

Let him read of what it sings

That life indeed is a wonderful thing

Searching for some pity in this town

Searching up and searching down

What I find I cannot fully tell

For whom the bell tolls, it's for you as well

3rd March dream

 I had a dream, I walked down

To the end of England

Down near Cornwall

There was a bench on the cliff and

A man sleeping there

Then I went down to the mines

A lazy ineffectual man was shovelling

coal into bags from a heap

On a trailer bed

I started to join in

I was stronger than him

He gave up

That is all I can remember 

Of that dream

Son of a dream

 You see it through to the end

You, do, oh you do my friend

Because the ache runs deep

Like the oak trees tap

Which speaks and seeps

And strange how sleep comes not to those who

Wait

But the deaf and dumb of fickle fate

And it is dawn, ticking on the lawn

The sun dial steals a smile

and peek at the clouds

But rain never comes

And the yellow grass hums

And the fathers and babies and mums

Succumb to the heat

Like a Viking invader

raping and pillaging our stores

Of energy

Drinking your water

Vampire fangs

Sucking on the pink flesh of man

A humour hangs

And arrow falls

The lap wing sung

Upon the wall

And out in dried up reed beds

The lonely moor hens rest their heads

Dying or living in chorus

So shall we because we are all connected

On some level I believe

Sleepless in Seattle New York

Or Milton Keynes

It's all the same foot to the metal

It's just the way I walk

Don't block the sun,

Or block the stream

Don't sing what's sung

Or hung what's been

The mother tongue

Is your only Queen

Do what she says son of a dream

Come and gone all unseen

Bearly credible

 While you were gone a bear came into the room

Compartment?

Yes

Overhead

The Bristol suspension bridge

But in France

Crossing the channel

Or the Severn

? And a bear you say?

Yes

I had to clean the compartments

That was my job

On a venicular railway

Funicular

I said? She said yea, or nay

My pronunciation was off

Ven- like a vein I said? or Fun- like a funnel?

The debate never did get resolved because there was the bear

A Polar Bear? Yeah well

It could have been brown

A brown bear there in the town?

In this very room I had to tame it and play

And even then I never turned my back on it,

Like they say

But all of a sudden another one came

Two bears! Yeah! I couldn't believe it and this other one taught the other to stand

He whom I had tamed and there he was as I was ruffling his mane

He stand taller than I and growled

Unlike a performing bear

This bear was wild

But it made me mad too

For all that care I had given to you, I said

And this is how you repay me! My shoulders grew

And the hair on the back of my neck was on end

And the bear cowered in the end

Then I felt bad to have dominated him so

But the alternative would surely have meant my being mauled by two

From head to toe

I left that job cleaning this the gondalas that run on the ski lift across the Bristol Channel

Black hole bathtub

I was taking a bath at about a quarter to eight

When the plug was pulled out and the water gate

It opened like a scandal, a vortex to perceive

But what I thought I saw through my cortex was hard to believe

I had diminished down to the size of a needle

And like a compass in a haystack, I was getting lost in middle

Further I was pulled into the blackholes suction

Gravity had me scrambling to stay away from its unction

But slip sliding I went like a Paul Simon song

Down towards the darkness of the unfathomable strong

Pull by increments, it speed became terrible

And I hollered like a fish Eagle balding without dirigible

Screaming in an ice floe no hope of escaping

I only thought of a selfie that my demise was worth taping

But wormhole or no, I knew not my destination

In the event of the horizon, I was without hesitation

I took a quick snapshot with my submersible kodak

And all that was left after my attack was a picture of black

Just me like a silver surfer on the cusp of going under

Down the rabbit hole like Alice to the land of endless thunder

When a booming went the kettle and flipped the flex to my surprise 

I ended up not in heaven but in a bathtub paradise

The whole episode was over in the blink of infinity's eye

And I could see once more my bathroom wall, and outside blue sky

 

I shan't say I liked it or wished I'd gone over

Because if it really was a black hole then I'd be an interstellar rover

And that job is already taken by a fellow named Musk

But he is just a shadow now as the daylight turns to dusk

Turkey

 They help us in the calling

Of a Colombus flower

The dirt off the shoe

Of a kangaroo

And the bell rings in the old 

Church tower

Each of these are mercies see 

When it comes to addressing the bones

The dead rise up in the swamp

In the swamp

And there they try to atone

For to kill the thing you love is worse

A worse sin

Than Heaven above knows

To tap the shoulder of the devil of love

To confuse him with being alone

To change your clothes in a waterfall

To fly and see the whole of the rainbow

Only complete when you've left the earth

A thousand feet below

Is this what the angels see papa?

When they look down from their clouds

Do they see rainbows and rings of colours?

Do they have rain in their eyes?

Does it rain where they are?

Is the mist of the stars

Too much too much to know

Is it a bird or a country, Turkey

Is Van Diemen's land a constellation of stars

Look let me show you how to sit on the bed

How to Span it with an arched back

How to raise your spine and look at the stars

Wheel above

As the bed turns like a carousel

And eternity spins high above us

Let us look at the crown of stars

Look are they another country?

Let us look at the man in the attic

Who was just looking for birds

As a buzzard swoops down onto the carcass

You say look it was a turkey not a country

In the end

But how can you tell in this land

Of cow pats

And early rats 

Who hunt near dawn

How can you tell who is telling the truth?

And why did you speak to the stranger like that?

My mother says to me

Because he was hiding in the attic

Because he likes to hide in the reeds

And he stalks birds and creeps up on them

And captures their souls secretly in his photographs

When they don't know it

He steals their beauty, that was only meant for nature 

And the morning to see

And it is only the vague dread they feel

Of being watched, by these silent men

Who wait like snakes in the grass

He wore a hat that was too small for his head

Like a cap on a battery

A bald battery with a broad jaw

Like Buffalo Bill

She said

And I told him that

And next time I looked he had fled

Or else there were vague shufflings

But I could not see him

Hidden in the reeds

Of the attic

A secret

And so I went out into the wide world

To look for him,

Like my mother and father once said

Look for yourself

Find yourself

But I kept needing the toilet

And so I ran back up to the attic

Where my secret fears were kept

In the house of tears

And I met the man who was running there

Too

He said I was born to sit for hours on the toilet

Waiting, I bring a book

So you go first

And then I tried the different wooden doors like beach huts

But some were occupied

Until one was vacant

But a lady came there first

So I gave it to her

And nothing was free 

then

Except the country and the turkey