Dreamtime News

[TranquillityBase]

I.
I.

Nausea of dreamtime.

A shaggy black horse
that I must ride like Dante:
this circle of Hell is a rodeo
and I’m a quaking greenhorn.
but it’s too wild to saddle
so I think I’m saved.

My joy is short lived,
while my wife sleeps 
I must babysit another beast:
a hairy pig, shaggy and dark like the horse,
it slips out of every fence I build
out of canned foods and chairs.
A drifter stops to help me pen it
(just across the dirt road
that borders this dream
lies Mexico.
there the pig must not go.)
The drifter alerts me
that the pig has horns.

II.

My wife, our cat and I
prisoners subjected to fiendish breeding experiments
that for some reason lack all terror
though I know we inhabit a Hitler camp
but they resemble the push-up position
described in a sex manual
that a Baptist preacher gave to my brother
just before his marriage.

The cat receives injections.
My wife is worried.
During a quiet walk around a running track
Uncle Adolf assures me
the cat will receive no more injections.

I say to my wife,
“So, we can escape on Saturday.”

[Knot]

.
Hi TqB,
I'd happily read the whole thing just for these lines
just across the dirt road
that borders this dream
lies Mexico.
but not that often. The rest seems rather flat, to me, slight paradoxes, random, dream-like changes of focus, but lacking in anything particularity nauseating, or newsworthy. There's a lot of 'I am this' and 'I am that', but it doesn't seem to build to anything vaguely climactic.

The 'dirt road' lines seem to promise an examination of what is America/the America dream these days, but perhaps that's a whole 'nother poem.


Best, Knot


.

[TranquillityBase]

.
Hi TqB,
I'd happily read the whole thing just for these lines
just across the dirt road
that borders this dream
lies Mexico.
but not that often. The rest seems rather flat, to me, slight paradoxes, random, dream-like changes of focus, but lacking in anything particularity nauseating, or newsworthy. There's a lot of 'I am this' and 'I am that', but it doesn't seem to build to anything vaguely climactic.

The 'dirt road' lines seem to promise an examination of what is America/the America dream these days, but perhaps that's a whole 'nother poem.

I suppose the "flatness" is because this is a transcription of a couple of dreams that I had during a time when my wife and I were going through a series of fertility treatments while trying to concieve our first child.  I won't go into the gory details and can only refer you to the scene early in the film Raising Arizona wherein Nicholas Cage and Holly Hunter are sitting in the doctor's office being lectured by a doctor on reproduction.

I thought perhaps it would be interesting to others, but maybe not.  I guess it is what it is.

TqB

[busker]

a hairy pig, shaggy and dark like the horse,
it slips out of every fence I build
out of canned foods and chairs.

I thought this part had great promise beyond the light humour of the poem. The pig could be so many things - so many possibilities, so many fears, the past, the future....
the hairy pig built like a horse. the black pig. the hidden monster in the barn.
I think it deserves a poem on its own.

For the rest, I would agree with knot in that the paradoxes weren't interesting enough.

I liked it that the pig would want to escape to Mexico

[Semicircle]

I.
I.

Nausea of dreamtime.

A shaggy black horse
that I must ride like Dante:
this circle of Hell is a rodeo
and I’m a quaking greenhorn.  Favorite visual
but it’s too wild to saddle
so I think I’m saved.

My joy is short lived,
while my wife sleeps 
I must babysit another beast:
a hairy pig, shaggy and dark like the horse,
it slips out of every fence I build
out of canned foods and chairs.
A drifter stops to help me pen it
(just across the dirt road
that borders this dream
lies Mexico.
there the pig must not go.)
The drifter alerts me
that the pig has horns.

II.

My wife, our cat and I
prisoners subjected to fiendish breeding experiments
that for some reason lack all terror
though I know we inhabit a Hitler camp
but they resemble the push-up position
described in a sex manual
that a Baptist preacher gave to my brother This is very surrealist
just before his marriage.

The cat receives injections.
My wife is worried.
During a quiet walk around a running track
Uncle Adolf assures me
the cat will receive no more injections.

I say to my wife,
“So, we can escape on Saturday.” Ending leaves you wondering