DANDEMONIUM

The blind has done its work:
only a faint speck
of street-lamp can pierce this room
withdrawn into itself


darkened to a cave
whose view has turned to blind
an obliterated mural
with one last dim spot.


This is the time when duvets
are huddled in cave-shapes;
slowly, brains are being displaced,
and bodies eased away


by figures who rear,
flicker across the walls
of closed eye-lids, taking forms
foreign, and yet long-known.


A woman dances free
of her twenty-year-old death
dreamed back by a partner
who rock-and-rolls away from his gout.


A sick man whose dreams
are crumbling into pastels
pounces beast-like into the mind
of a son who is now middle-aged.


The frailest body
has turned into a stronghold,
an inaccessible lair
of lives so untamed,


so creatured by the dark
they flee the light of day;
seeking a refuge sealed
by the eyelid’s sleepy-glue.


When an intrusive ray
prises this lid apart
they hide deep in the dark of self
in the unknown depths of mind


fleeing the daytime brain
which puzzles, clutches, gropes,
anxious to retrieve
what already is dispersed.


But now it is night:
now the living and the dead
sweep across the walls of a skull
closed inward in sleep.