Dreams
It is later than late,
the simmered down darkness
of the jukebox hour.
The hour of drunkenness
and cigarettes.
The fools hour.
In my dreams,
I still smoke, cigarette after cigarette.
It's okay, I'm dreaming.
In dreams, smoking can't kill me.
It's warm outside.
I have every window open.
There's no such thing as danger,
only the dangerous face of beauty.
I am hanging at my window
like a houseplant.
I am smoking a cigarette.
I am having a drink.
The pale, blue moon is shining.
The savage stars appear.
Every fool that passes by
smiles up at me.
I drip ashes on them.
There is music playing from somewhere.
A thready, salt-sweet tune I don't know
any of the words to.
There's a gentle breeze making
hopscotch with my hair.
This is the wet blanket air of midnight.
This is the incremental hour.
This is the plastic placemat of time
between reality and make-believe.
This is tabletop dream time.
This is that faint stain on your mattress,
the one you'll discover come morning,
and wonder how.
This is the monumental moment.
The essential: look at me now.
This is the hour.
Isn't it lovely? Wake up the stars!
Isn't it fabulous? Kiss the moon!
Where is the clock? The one that
always runs ahead. The one
that always tries to crush me with
its future.
Originally published in Literati Magazine, Winter 2005.
Copyright © Lisa Zaran 2005
Literary Analysis
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Summary
Lisa Zaran places the poem in the hushed, compromised hours after midnight, when judgment loosens and imagination takes over. The opening lines settle into a world of smoky light, drink, music, and lateness, and the poem's voice moves easily between self-mockery and longing. The central figure is someone who knows the risks of pleasure but temporarily suspends them inside dream logic, where smoking, drinking, and looking beautiful are all made to feel harmless.
As the poem progresses, the dream becomes less a private fantasy than a stage on which the self can be seen and admired. The repeated declarations, especially the insistent "This is," turn the scene into a performance of desire, beauty, and defiance. Yet the final turn toward the clock brings back pressure and anxiety: time is not just passing, but threatening. The poem's emotional tension lies in that contrast between the seductive freedom of dream life and the hard pull of waking reality, where consequence, mortality, and the future return.
Theme
- Dream and escape - The dream state gives the poem its freedom from ordinary consequence, allowing actions that would be harmful or irresponsible in waking life to feel temporary, playful, and safe.
- Time and pressure - The repeated sense of lateness and the final image of the clock suggest that time is oppressive, always moving faster than the self can comfortably follow.
- Beauty and danger - The poem links attraction with risk, suggesting that what is most beautiful can also be what unsettles or endangers the self.
- Self-presentation - The poem turns the private dream into a kind of posed scene, where the body at the window becomes an image meant to be seen and admired.
- Mortality and denial - Smoking and drinking appear in a dream space where harm is momentarily suspended, but the poem quietly keeps the reality of damage in view.
- Nightlife and performance - The jazz-club atmosphere, drink, cigarettes, and music create a theatrical late-night mood in which the self seems to exist on a stage of its own making.
Literary Devices
- Repetition - Repeated phrases such as the emphatic "This is" build momentum and give the poem the feeling of an incantation or self-authored spell.
- Metaphor - The poem uses vivid comparisons such as the "plastic placemat of time" to make the dream feel both ordinary and strangely artificial.
- Personification - Time, the moon, stars, and the clock are given active or human-like force, which heightens the poem's sense of pressure and spectacle.
- Imagery - Smoky air, pale moonlight, ashes, and music create a rich sensory world that makes the dream scene vivid and tactile.
- Enjambment - The line breaks keep the poem moving in a loose, drifting way that matches the unstable logic of dreaming.
- Irony - The speaker treats dangerous habits as harmless inside the dream, creating a playful but uneasy contrast between fantasy and reality.
- Free verse - The lack of strict rhyme or meter mirrors the poem's wandering, intimate thought process and dreamlike movement.
Symbolism
- Cigarette - The cigarette can suggest self-destructive habit, sensuality, and a temporary refusal of consequence.
- Open windows - The open windows imply exposure, freedom, and a willingness to let the night enter the self.
- Moon - The moon functions as a cool, watchful presence that lends the scene its dreamy, almost theatrical glow.
- Clock - The clock symbolizes time's authority and the future's pressure, the force the poem most clearly resists.
- Stain on the mattress - The stain suggests evidence, aftermath, and the return of reality after a night of intoxication or imagination.
- Window ledge - Hanging at the window evokes a threshold between inner life and the world outside, as well as a pose of display.
Tone
Zaran's tone is playful, seductive, and slightly wry, as if the poem is smiling at its own recklessness even while admitting its risks. The mood feels nocturnal and intimate, with a smoky, jazz-bar haze that makes the dream seem both glamorous and unstable. By the end, that looseness gives way to unease, and the reader feels the pull of time pressing in behind the poem's flirtation with freedom.
Historical Context
The poem fits comfortably within contemporary free verse lyric poetry, where everyday speech, vivid sensory detail, and shifts in voice often carry the emotional weight that older formal structures once did. Its late-night setting, candid first-person perspective, and mingling of beauty with self-awareness also place it in a tradition of modern urban poetry that treats private experience as both performance and confession.
Its dreamlike imagery and ironic edge echo a broader twentieth- and twenty-first-century interest in the unstable border between waking life and imagination. Rather than relying on elaborate narrative, the poem builds meaning through atmosphere, recurrence, and a sharp awareness of how desire can coexist with danger.
Turn off ads, get more exposure for your poetry, and get more features with a
Premium Membership.
