Float Your Boat

Most annoyingly
And amusingly,
The architecture

Of your hospice dreams
Deliberately
Contradicts the walls

Of ordinary,
Waking existence—
If, within the dream,

There’s a large hallway
Leading from your left
Into the distance,

Receding stairwells
Of Piranesi
Ruination, then

When you turn your head
And open your eyes,
A shelf startles you,

Inches from your face.
And if there’s a stone
Rolled athwart your path

In one of your dreams,
Vertigo’s waiting
For you to wake perched

At the very edge
Of your too tall bed.
What’s the brain up to?

Is it translating
Via negatives
Like a camera

Had to, analog
Apertures needing
Reversals to close

In on the outer
World? Or are neurons
Weaving your basket

Of contradictions
For escape, the craft
Of the watertight

Coracle you’ll sail
When your real is gone,
When your dreams are done.

Trismegistus

For some strange reason you find
It feels good, at the moment,
To be short of breath. You haul

On your lungs like a sailor
Lifting canvas sail alone,
And it feels good, feels profound,

Although it can’t possibly
Carry good Implications.
Tristram, you say to yourself,

For no reason other than
Liking the feel of the word.
Tristram, and you remember

The black page in your fingers,
How a little of the ink
Rubbed off on your fingertips.

You take another deep breath,
Like someone about to do
Something difficult, and then

You watch the sun on your hands,
Decades now, decades after
They were ink-stained with Tristram.

The whole gift of memory
Is for experiences
To exist that don’t exist.