Time to wake up

My dream…Something good was about to happen. I was trying to go back there.
~Samuel, age 7, in tears upon waking late for school after ignoring his mother’s calls

Sometimes, no matter that we slap ourselves to stay awake,
we fall asleep. We wake within someone else’s dream,
driving past their 7-11, their grocery carts, speeding through
their neighborhoods, getting pulled over by their police.

We go with it. Wear their brand of bra. Raise children
in their schools.  Watch their favorite movies: horror.
They tolerate ours: foreign drama. Years pass.

We try to remember the dream we were having before,
the one where something good was about to happen.

Then the dreamers who pulled us in—leave,
leave us in their dream.  We walk their streets
at night. Paint their walls. Tend their weeds.

We twist and kick to wrest ourselves awake.
Speak in a dream tongue no one else speaks.
The dream quakes. Its inhabitants turn away.
Maybe someone watching us sleep sees

our lips move, hears the sounds becoming heavy
words:  wake me. They do. We grab our children’s
hands and try to pull them through.

But the dream holds on to our feet just when
something good is about to happen,

because something good is about to happen,
is always happening, and to be awake means
something we never dreamed.

Mantras

Sit under the full moon
until you are sitting there,

and the week’s riot orchestra
is replaced by crickets,

and crescendos
and is replaced again.

Wind raises skin
and orange moon

brims to white while words
of the busy day grow quiet, replaced

by sky, glinting space.  It may be
morning before the messages

sift through  and out of you, so slow,
though speed has moved such water through

the body to burst, aching diaphragm
a fist.  Unclench, unclench,

the crickets pitch at angles.  And owl
begs its usual who? who? who?

unblinking under moon,
and Oh, mmm,  mmmm.

The chest opens its lid.
Breath joins the gentle wind.

Lidless, you are more
than you, and blissfully less.

2009

Detachment

You’ve walked in like a worldless god
and claimed me as your home.
How is it these arms cannot hold?
How is it this hair needs no tangled hands,
these thighs no tremble? Whose breath is this?
Are you a demon or an angel?
You, wordless, whisper, give it all away.
At once I am an onion cliché, peeling back and back
in your hands. And there are no tears
for what falls: couches, hair, clothes,
trinkets, houses, a rainbow of countless gods,
and no tears to find that, smaller
and smaller, I am okay. I am
an emptiness that watches and waits
to be passed through.

Dedication Prayer

May any good that walks
through the three
doors of me

walk toward
your three doors.
And yours.  And yours.

Once we leap over
stones of who we were,
are, or could be,

burn through clouds
of clench, shove and sleep,
may we quickly wake

the inter-nestled light
of our three prism bodies
where we are less than one,

more than three.

~with thanks to T.W.R., who taught me