I dreamed I saw Charles Moore last night
Alive in a bed sit
But Charles, I said,
That Kingsized bed,
However did it fit?
However did it fit?
He said with a patrician drawl
This is no den of vice
But Crisis looms.
This tiny room’s
My pompous sacrifice,
My pompous sacrifice.
That dream is true, as lucid as
My dreams since I was small
Which often fake
Being awake.
Seems I’ve not slept at all,
I’ve never slept at all
A weird and teeming world of things
That aren’t and couldn’t be
While I’m asleep
Furtively creep
Into my memory
Of this world inside me
Jump-cutting logic my dreams serve
To scare stiff, or delight,
Their clarity’s
Disparity
Entertains me in flight
As I fly through the night
But when I had Covid-19
A fact that’s now confirmed
My dreaming mind
Began to grind
As feverishly I squirmed
And dullness inwards wormed.
The dream I had remained the same,
Repeated all night through:
A rock, white, round
Stuck to the ground
And a line I drew
That was all I knew
I’d drawn the line with felt-tipped pen;
According to my brief
It must be shown
Beneath the stone.
Dreams weave their own belief
But this brief brought me grief
To draw a line beneath a stone:
To get this job complete
To get the line
To undermine...
That’s it: fade and repeat;
Again, fade and repeat.
The line undrawn, the stone unmoved
No way to expedite
This task some way;
I press replay
Ten thousand times each night
Ten thousand times each night
I don’t care what this dream might mean
Or even whether it’s
Some shit that Freud
Would best avoid
From my subconscious pits.
Avoid analysis
And tell me why this virus might
In its murderous schemes
Destroy the wonder
Through which I blunder
Each night in my dreams,
Even kill my dreams?
And tell me, in that Shadowland
We go to as we slumber
And keep well hid
Inside the Id
Are there dream dead without number?
Our dreams no more to encumber?
Can we be locked down in our dreams
Can dumb disease go creeping
To isolate
Us from those great
Adventures we have sleeping
Adventures when we’re sleeping?
I’m lucky, because I woke up.
My Big Sleep? It’s postponed.
I live, to sleep
To let things creep
Through dreams to get me honed,
Things that God never owned.