Dream Studies

Dream Studies

These little guys are born to find this out.

Instinctively they search and snoop through mazes

And in their dreams restudy all the places

Where they’ve been. By morning they can scout

A hidden cavity as if it’s bright

With sunshine. Such the wonders of the brain.

Their search reopens long forgotten veins

of human understanding. This new insight

reminds me of that old road to the madhouse:

to whit, recounting what I should have said

repeatedly upon my bed

Insults the dignity even of a mouse.

For long ago the Lord revealed a better path

“Let not the sun go down upon your wrath.”

Alien Encounter

You greet my deities with disgust
My gods and fears are strange to you
They cannot charm or be discussed

If I’ve found ways to tame my lust
And loathsome habits now eschew
You greet my deities with disgust

My gods have ways you call unjust
Their famous mercies all too few
They cannot charm or be discussed

Before your votive lights a bust
Siddhartha, Christ, or Lao Tzu
They greet my deities with disgust

Their ears are stone, their eyes have dust
Their aging skin a sickening hew
They cannot charm or be discussed

Between us grows a hardened crust
There’s nothing fresh and nothing new
You greet my deities with disgust
They cannot charm or be discussed.

Horror and Humor

Horror and Humor
In the world of entertainment
Are sisters.
It’s all they can do,
The implausible monsters,
To keep a straight face.
Damsels in distress
Screaming their tonsils out,
Laugh hysterically between shots.

Elsewhere Horror and Humor
Never speak to one another;
They live on separate planets.
There’s really nothing funny
About hunger, rape, or ravaging armies.

Sexuality often joins her sister Humor,
They live and work together,
Share picnics and family fun,
Office parties and vacations;
But they never pray.
Nor do they meet in church
With Sister Faith.
She goes alone.
Men and women may laugh
With delight at their nakedness,
Its touch and sight and smell,
But there’s no kiss and tell in church.
If Adam finds no suitable partner
In his menagerie
his straight man –
God –
Doesn’t laugh knowingly.
Nor does the congregation.

But Sex and Horror tryst
And not only in slasher films.
Children defiled try to sort out
The sordid, tangled strands
Of love, anger, hate, affection, loathing, fear.
Adults too renounce affection
When they find it in bed
With Force
Coiled like a snake around its waist.
We wait for peace to no avail;
For a time of healing, but terror comes instead.

Speaking of which:
I notice Faith is often unwelcome.
Mine is pretty silly --
All that praising and thanking --
And the groveling.
I wish I didn’t grovel.
It lacks dignity.

Thanks for bearing with my religion;
I’ll try not to pray too long.
I know it’s tiresome.
It’s just the attempt
To speak the unspeakable
Explain the inexplicable
Unscrew the inscrutable
Unleashes a barrage
Of words and they keep coming.
“INCOMING!”
Perhaps it’s more like a deluge.
“MAN THE BILGE PUMPS!
HERE IT COMES AGAIN!”
Sometimes ideas flow too,
Incoherently.
I see connections everywhere.

The crucifixion, for instance,
Horror or humor?
Wasn’t his rout of the demons pretty damned funny?
Didn’t you laugh at their bare
Butts disappearing in the distance?
Weren’t you glad at your relief?
You find no humor at all
When you recall your fears and doubt?

How many times did he tell you
Be not afraid?
But you feared and now
You realize how groundless
Were your fears.
God was always in charge,
If only you had believed.

But it was horrible too.

A man’s dying on the cross –
What is beautiful about that?
How can you say,
“What a beautiful crucifix over the altar?”
It’s horrible.
But not half so grisly as
The man’s body stretched
By uplifting nails
And the downward dead-weight
Yank of gravity;
His flayed flesh;
Yellow, brown, red filth
Streaming from every orifice,
Shoulders, elbows, arms unjointed,
Head upside-down
Hanging helpless heavy.
The stench alone was unbearable.
The crowds jeered, of course.
What else could they do?
The sight of his bestial nature
Stripped them of human decency.

There is no comedy there.
Is it decent to remember
Or imagine
Or describe?
Is it better left unsaid?
If you dare you will find
Even sexual abuse in this
Passion Narrative –
His nakedness, the taunts and jeers,
The leering eyes of strangers,
And his helplessness.
What did they feel in their loins,
What stimulant,
As they stripped, tortured, nailed
And raised him up?

But we will laugh on Sunday
Tears streaming from our eyes
As we hear the good news.
Free at last, free at last,
Thank God Almighty I am free at last.

There is healing in his wings
Even for children.
Love and truth will meet;
Justice and peace will kiss.
The wolf shall be guest of the lamb,
And the leopard lie down with the kid;
Horror and Humor will sport together
As Faith and Sex slap hands. 

Holy Week, 1993

I holy weeked in a hospital bed
And saw the services
From below the surface of my suffering
On a TV screen.
I wondered at those men
Who walked on the dry land of comfort,
Who sang songs
And read readings
And kissed crosses,
But could not speak to me
Beneath the surface of my suffering.
They seemed like men
On an island
-- or a continent –
in the middle of a continent --
far from the vast waters of pain
that gird our world – that washed over me.

Our Earth, they say, should be called Water
And our lives should be called Pain.
But we spend most of our lives
On the dry land of comfort
Hardly aware of those who
Lie beneath the surface of their suffering
And gaze on us with glassy eyes.

A Moment Passes by with Every Breath

A moment passes by with every breath
And the future, channeled through this gap of now
Gives way to a backlog of opportunities
Lost, never reclaimed or rediscovered
Even as an infinity of futurities unimaginable
Eagerly pile up behind this narrow strait.

Dear Aging Heart, we have walked an older street
With anguished time forgot and labored breath
Navigating cycles of years with imagined
Pleasures that seemed so real then, but now
They reel like errant importunities.
Can memories unlimited discover

In rude stories unrued, undiscovered
Airs or gusts of goodness? The straight
Path on which I set out despite the portents
Was fair enough, I think; and yet I breathe
Worrisome belabored stories and I know
That no one – or few – can imagine

The troubles I have caused. But doesn’t Imagination
Work with Grace and Bliss to cover
The past in future glory? And the now
Has a mystic, magic madness that straightens
Twisted, tortured traumas until their breath
Comes easily and their importance

Resounds like blessed opportunities.
No one on this side of the grave imagines
The endless openings that curl and wreath
Even yet around each unrecovered
Moment of the past. An amazing now,
Bending under futures’ pressures straightens

And heals even that most regretted traitor’s
Kiss. It harrows hell and finds unfortunates
Who could not imagine or dream a knowing
Happiness. Their lives lost and unmanaged,
Unremembered shall be recovered
And they will rise up breathing.

Laboratory Rats

These little guys are born to search about
In affluent mansions and filthy shacks
As bitter thoughts rehearsed shut blessings out.
They breed and thrive in crevices and cracks

From affluent mansions to filthy shacks
Their feverish claws and black snouts fierce
They breed and thrive in crevices and cracks,
Through cement walls and wooden floors they pierce

Their feverish claws and black snouts fierce
As angry notions set afire the past
Through cement walls and wooden floors they pierce,
These sordid thoughts that leave my soul aghast

As angry notions set afire the past
The rats they run these mazes in their dreams
Like sordid thoughts that leave my soul aghast
They ruminate on narrow, tortured seams

The rats they run these mazes in their dreams
Commit to memory the twisted scene
And ruminate on narrow, tortured seams
Of lessons hard, resentful, bitter, mean

Commit to memory the twisted scene
Resuming days with angers freshly armed
Of lessons hard, resentful, bitter, mean
And slights, insults, and tender feelings harmed

Resuming days with angers freshly armed
Like rats who memorize in sleep the torrid
Slights, insults, and tender feelings harmed
And Satan from his tortured Sheol is horrid

Like rats I memorize in sleep the torrid
Bitter cup spills through my blood and speech
And Satan from his tortured Sheol is horrid
While human pleasures fading out of reach

The bitter cup flows through my blood and speech
Its stench like putrid odors endless reek
And human pleasures fading out of reach
Until the madness reaches such a peak

Its stench like putrid odors endless reek
And something breaks, a snap within unheard
The gnawing madness reaches such a peak
Their midnight scuffling speaks a two-edged word

And something breaks, a snap within now heard
That even rats can find a better path
Their midnight scuffling speaks a two-edged word
“Let not the sun go down upon your wrath”

And even rats have found a better path
As ancient lessons echo from the deep
“Let not the sun go down upon your wrath”
For dreaming animals relearn in sleep

As ancient lessons echo from the deep
Synapses firing softly through the night
For dreaming animals relearn in sleep
And morning finds them racing with delight

Synapses firing softly through the night
Beloved dark and labyrinthine lanes
And morning finds them racing with delight
Where sunless dark and brilliance never wane

They love the dark and labyrinthine lanes
And lead me from the world of my disgrace –
Where sunless dark and brilliance never wane
In knowledge of their simple earth-bound place.

They lead me from the world of my disgrace –
My unforgotten misbegotten feuds --
By knowledge of their simpler, earth bound grace
I’ve settled down where gentle kindness broods

Dismissing all my misbegotten feuds
For bitter thoughts rehearsed shut blessings out
And loveliness with gentle kindness broods.
These little guys were born to search this out.

No Man's Land

He’s lost to us he’ll not come home
The church your friends we’re here for you
His family prays in the waiting room.

We hear your cries they’re killing us
Death’s placid stare across the line
He’s lost to us he’ll not come home

Our trenches dug, our lines of prayer
We’ll not back off, our God is good
His family prays in the waiting room.

You’ve got the best care in the world
They won’t surrender you to death
He’s lost to us he’ll not come home

It’s all we do to stay this close
We sanitize each thing we touch
His family prays in the waiting room.

There is no life in the DMZ
And ICU survives on hope
He’s lost to us he’ll not come home
His family prays in the waiting room.

Paperweight Sonnets

1)
I walked along a northern shore and found
A pebble in my hands. This solid rock
Must weather waves and crushing ice that shock
Its razored unrelenting ridges round
Until uncalloused hands caress it. Worth
No more than sentiment, a paperweight,
It idles on my desk; it's likely fate,
To settle as my sediment to earth.
Once formed within a molten core, condensed,
And broken from nomadic mountain stone,
Its timeless, reckless tale it cannot own.
It knows no self. My sentience breaks against
Its surface, slaps and churns, but can’t displace
A bit of mica from its scabrous face.


2)
My desk without its usual piled debris
Reveals a wide expanse of wood, and one
Remaining paperweight. A falling ton
Of shattered granite, milled and ground-down
scree,
Has left this solitary boulder shard
Ensconced upon my desk, like Hector’s stalled
Attack upon Atrides’ naval wall.
Defying time or tempering; it’s hard
Resistance challenges the polished plane
Of lacquered wood. So easy to remove,
But grim, it glowers and would cut a groove
To anchor itself there. It threatens pain
Upon the flesh that one time felt its sting
In ancient battle from a rawhide sling.

3)
The diamond on her finger wakened hope
That slumbered in this paperweight of mine.
This mongrel rock has no distinction fine
But if there were a prospect, might elope
With solitaire of higher social caste.
It bears within its variegated line
Old veins of quartz and granite, flecks that shine
And gleam like stars. Although it has a past
Not lustrous, but of many shady years,
This paperweight forgets his former life,
And dreams of cultured days and pretty wife.
Alas, the lovely gem prefers her peers
Despite the stony heart so sorely smit.
By crystal purity he’s ground to grit.


4)
This ornamental basalt lightly weighs
The piled-up papers on my desk, as if
It never knew its gravity. Adrift
On seas of time, it floats through current days
Without a sigh. A thousand years are but
A moment to this rock; a day not worth
The mentioning. It’s font in fiery earth
And early years in earthen womb – deep shut
In stygian gloom a million years and more –
Are not a wretched memory; nor, carved
By raging storms, has this stone ever starved
For love. It only shudders at the roar
Of wind and rain and fire and quake and blast
That mean it must be shattered at the last.

The Nurse

Sometimes it’s better not to know.
But you know,
you think,
or you suspect
you’re caring for this patient
better than he ever cared for himself.
He never cared;
Daily he made war
killing himself.
You know it; you see it.
But you don’t know;
You don’t think;
You don’t let yourself think;
And you care for him
Not for the money
Nor the job.
He’s a human being
And you’re a human being.