Dreams and Imagination

Time has passed like a courier with urgent news. But that’s just our simile. The character’s invented, his haste is make-believe, his news inhuman.

They dance between their arclamps and our skull, Impose their shots, throwing the nights away. We watch the show of shadows kiss or kill, Flavoured of celluloid give love the lie.

My steps along this street Resound in another street In which I hear my steps Passing along this street In which Only the mist is real.

I am the magical mouse I don’t eat cheese I eat sunsets And the tops of trees.

I’d have nightmares of other islands stretching away from mine, infinities of islands, islands spawning islands like frogs’ eggs turning into polliwogs of islands, knowing that I had to live on each and every one, eventually, for ages, registering their flora, their fauna, their geography.

O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you’ve missed. The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea cup opens A lane to the land of the dead.

What happens to a dream deferred? Maybe it just sags Or does it explode?

Good morning, daddy! Ain’t you heard The boogie-woogie rumble Of a dream deferred?

Green, how much I want you green. Green wind. Green branches. The ship upon the sea and the horse in the mountain.

when the world is puddle-wonderful

How should I know what I’ll be, I who don’t know what I am? Be what I think? But I think of being so many things! And there are so many who think of being the same thing that we can’t all be it! Genius? At this moment A hundred thousand brains are dreaming they’re geniuses like me, And it may be that history won’t remember even one, All their imagined conquests amounting to so much dung.

Wavering between the profit and the loss In this brief transit where the dreams cross The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying.

The time. Redeem The unread vision in the higher dream While jeweled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

Fish say, they have their stream and pond; But is there anything beyond?

Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea.

The palm at the end of the mind, Beyond the last thought, rises… A gold-feathered bird Sings in the palm.

We say God and the imagination are one… How high that highest candle lights the dark. 1

Light the first light of evening, as in a room In which we rest and, for small reason, think The world imagined is the ultimate good.

These external regions, what do we fill them with Except reflections, the escapades of death, Cinderella fulfilling herself beneath the roof.

By the terrible incantations of defeats And by the fear that defeats and dreams The whole race is a poet that writes down The eccentric propositions of its fate.

She says, “But in contentment I still feel The need of some imperishable bliss.” Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our desires.

Only, here and there, an old sailor, Drunk and asleep in his boots, Catches tigers In red weather.