Words, No Images

Flowers and violence,
Just the phrases, no pictures,
A dream without pictures,

How can it be a dream?
Hallucination, then?
No images at all,

Just a male voice chanting
Variations, towers
Of flowers, violence.

You shake yourself awake.
You could do without towers
Of violence, even

If they’re just phrases here.
Bad trip? Bad medicine?
It’s been more than an hour.

Who dreams only in words,
Wakes coughing raggedly?
Pain killer. What a phrase.

Pain is unkillable.
Pain filter. More like it.
But a pain translator?

What drug could turn phrases
On a lathe, out of pain,
Into disembodied

Voices calmly chanting
Flowers and violence
But nothing to see here.