Upon Waking
“Upon Waking”
Slumber has its upsides
while the outside runs around
like a split fowlyard,
cacophonous
pecking at each other
and at the ground…
Elsewhere,
like dull background noise
through the fog of dream
the sound of the gamble
and its slot machines
discordantly admitting The Others
through the turnstiles;
The Sleeper has assignations
with higher things, all around -
all around – one could consider
the whole gambit a stroke of good luck, this,
largesse to revisit higher things who have passed on
to The Sleeper this Slumber, like a bestowed practice run
for better things to come;
On the Other Side
the cat’s at the ever-ready
soft pawed the feline considers
The Sleeper's reflection,
should The Sleeper turn on The Giant,
go sit on its shoulder and pounce;
Still vetted by Morpheus in that hidden foreign place -
The Sleeper is kept, yet The Sleeper is free to run riot
wherever the Sleeper pleases, The Sleeper runs on,
through walls and through walls into Forever Night,
this is the way of The Kept In-Between,
Bardos have their pleasantries,
unchecked to do what Sleepers please -
The Sleeper converses with The Poets
who speak through hands, and
is advised automatically to beware,
for The Sleeper is a new comer
to this place of The Tower,
it is a very different diaphonous land
they tell The Sleeper in all manner of ways, that,
The Sleeper
is in the presence
of Holy and Unholy things
with The Invisible Heard-But-Not-Seen
walking the corridors like The Defrocked -
Poets, Popes, Red Cardinals, Bishops, their Kings and their Queens
they travel in flocks, all aloof politicians
lobbying, tilting tables, reading
palms (sic) psalms and the automatic writing on walls
The Shadows of Soldier spectrals stand guard at Gort,
like Dark Knights holding the hands of The Forgotten Children,
in sullied undignified Courts -
all see themselves in the hollow-hung mirrors sometimes not so hallow
and through the open windows of those travelling dreams like tourists,
for a short while they are shocked, then astounded, they discover
they are not kept at all, in fact, they are allowed the freedom
to come and to go, to do as they please,
for they are not locked into Heaven, nor Hell, so,
they edit their meanings in words written on walls
the messages boxed like bodies
in Visitor Books
they nourish themselves
with like-minded spooks
with tinctures revered like heady broth,
they’ve been lost in their cups
merrily and unmerrily
for eternity, without evening knowing
they were in fact not summoned by God
but were summoned by Poets in poems
haunting the halls
of Thoor Ballylee
The Sleeper glides effortlessly
making The Sleeper's way up the turreted stairs
to the inner sanctum,
The Stranger’s Room
to converse
with what waits ...
'tis too late,
The Sleeper awakes
Candide Diderot. ‘24
“I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire, a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy—
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato's parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.”
W.B.Y.
“I am contented
For I know that Quiet Wanderer
And may find him or his friends
Among the winds that clamour down the empty walled garden,
Or play in the flooded stream;
Or that at twilight by some old black water
He may suddenly rise in green reed from an old stone bridge,
Or be some passing woman’s harsh wild song.”
W.B.Y.
“My own mind is perfectly unprejudiced and impressible on the subject. I do not in the least pretend that such things are not. But … I have not yet met with any Ghost Story that was proved to me, or that had not the noticeable peculiarity in it—that the alteration of some slight circumstance would bring it within the range of common natural probabilities.”
Charles Dickens
(“Ghost Club: Yeats’s and Dickens’s Secret Society of Spirits”/The Paris Review, Peter Hoskin, October 31, 2017)
“History repeats the old conceits
The glib replies the same defeats
Keep your finger on important issues
With crocodile tears and a pocketful of tissues
I'm just the oily slick
On the windup world of the nervous tick
In a very fashionable hovel
I hang around dying to be tortured
You'll never be alone in the bone orchard ...
So in this almost empty gin palace
Through a two-way looking glass
You see your Alice ...
I got a feeling
I'm going to get a lot of grief
Once this seemed so appealing
Now I am beyond belief.”
(extract: Beyond Belief/Elvis Costello)
Copyright ©
Candide Diderot
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