Dreaming of Escape
I.
My mind is adapting to this desperate millenium
which reminds me of a city bird
confused and chattering beneath the unnatural glow of a streetlamp
flickering and burning out at 3:00 in the morning.
I too am awake at this strange hour,
cigarette-hand twitching in the city's schizophrenia.
I can read two-hundred words a minute,
and at the bottom of the tv screen, the news won't stop scrolling:
busy white letters over electric-blue tape
like a neverending manuscript, though the stories keep repeating;
same thing as last week, only different names,
new interesting shots of gravestones,
and shameless forced interviews with freshly sobbing women.
I turned off my tv a couple of months ago, for good,
like cutting off contact with an old depressed drunk that just won't shut up.
After all that bad news,
I'm beginning to understand why kites have strings
to tie them to the ground like slaves
for the amusement of innocent children.
And it's all in the eyes.
Something makes me think that if you saw an old man without them,
if there were two empty sockets filled with shadow instead,
you'd still try to look him in the eyes when you spoke with him,
and in the back of your mind you'd jump to the conclusion that he also had no soul.
How do you sleep at night?
II.
In dreams, the world approaches ideal:
utopias of grass and the sculptural wisdom of cliffs,
finally peace & quiet, absence of humanity.
There's a great ancient story about a god who got angry:
the humans were making too much noise,
so he drowned them all in a flood.
In the paradox cinematography of dreams,
projected both from and into my very own mind,
I finally become my own god.
But still I always wake up wondering:
am I author or actor?
Then I slip back to sleep
where the questions just aren't as important
as the effortless curve of a stream
or the sound of it mumbling.
III.
In my dreams you're a performance artist:
feet breaking free from the ground,
you balloon upward,
shrinking away into distance,
until the relic of a dot is lost,
forever buried in the sky.
It seems as if your feet no longer have anything to do with this place.
My mind is adapting to this desperate millenium
which reminds me of a city bird
confused and chattering beneath the unnatural glow of a streetlamp
flickering and burning out at 3:00 in the morning.
I too am awake at this strange hour,
cigarette-hand twitching in the city's schizophrenia.
I can read two-hundred words a minute,
and at the bottom of the tv screen, the news won't stop scrolling:
busy white letters over electric-blue tape
like a neverending manuscript, though the stories keep repeating;
same thing as last week, only different names,
new interesting shots of gravestones,
and shameless forced interviews with freshly sobbing women.
I turned off my tv a couple of months ago, for good,
like cutting off contact with an old depressed drunk that just won't shut up.
After all that bad news,
I'm beginning to understand why kites have strings
to tie them to the ground like slaves
for the amusement of innocent children.
And it's all in the eyes.
Something makes me think that if you saw an old man without them,
if there were two empty sockets filled with shadow instead,
you'd still try to look him in the eyes when you spoke with him,
and in the back of your mind you'd jump to the conclusion that he also had no soul.
How do you sleep at night?
II.
In dreams, the world approaches ideal:
utopias of grass and the sculptural wisdom of cliffs,
finally peace & quiet, absence of humanity.
There's a great ancient story about a god who got angry:
the humans were making too much noise,
so he drowned them all in a flood.
In the paradox cinematography of dreams,
projected both from and into my very own mind,
I finally become my own god.
But still I always wake up wondering:
am I author or actor?
Then I slip back to sleep
where the questions just aren't as important
as the effortless curve of a stream
or the sound of it mumbling.
III.
In my dreams you're a performance artist:
feet breaking free from the ground,
you balloon upward,
shrinking away into distance,
until the relic of a dot is lost,
forever buried in the sky.
It seems as if your feet no longer have anything to do with this place.