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Eyes Of The Walls
A little over a year ago, I tripped over a crack in the sidewalk in front of our house. The fall resulted in a badly torn rotator cuff that ended in surgery. After surgery, I was given some pretty hard-core pain medications that resulted in some bizarre, surreal dreams. This poem is a recounting of one of those dreams. I'm sure Jung would have a field day analyzing this dream.
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dozens of switches emerge from the walls
like square faces, illuminating smiles
with a single touch at the tip of their noses;
leaves of plants like green creatures' palms,
waiting to slap me, or shake hands with me;
cactus-thorns waiting to pierce my fingers,
and taste my red blood with their green gelatine
beneath my affectionate, tender touch;
the parrots peek at me through the cage's bars
with their beady surveillance-camera eyes,
with deafening twitters which make my heart
evade out of its own ribcage, and explode my brain
in thousands of echoes, reverberating through my veins;
the abat-jours hide the light beneath umbrellas
emerging in the darkness, like mushrooms after the rain,
breaking the moss, and the moist orange foliage
in a forest frightened with wind, shaking branches
like skeletons unearthed from cemeteries;
like the dead claiming the life:
the little life that shrinks around my sparrow heart;
the mythological gods with their ghostly shadows
reflected in the sky-blue glass-walls, stretch to catch
the sunbeams, and walk out of their pedestals;
parading naked in the common—naked white silhouettes:
walking beings with no being of their own,
except in my mind which attributes them magic.
Copyright ©
Sara Etgen-Baker
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