You Dream
You Dream
You dream me a dream.
You and I careen,
wide-eyed and screaming
wild cries, clutching the sides
of our Thunder Mountain cart
on its rickety wooden rails
that fail
and we swoosh--like a flume
into a silent lagoon of silver water,
our cart transformed:
a sleek Venetian ebony gondola--
there with my long-dead brother singing
old familiar camp songs--we must duck down,
head-to-head,
to slip into the ribs of a skiff in Capri,
lying so low, to enter
the fluorescent Blue Grotto.
We emerge breathless in time.
You have lost my passport.
No one speaks our language.
No one understands.
We run away together, away and away
but the drunken brutal border guards
rip me from you, make me naked, take me to a desert
where I shall be shot, shot
because you lost your wallet.
You cannot pay my fine--
the fine demanded, extracted, exacted,
a sane insistence it seems in dreams,
all reveries in sync:
until the brink comes:
you terrorized by the Universal Dream of Descent,
you fall, fall, fall--unready to meet the Morning Star.
But you will not today:
today you will wake to find
the digital clock and the leather block--
your wallet there before your eyes--
yet oft' you wish you might return
to sleep, to complete
just one serene dream,
just one
ending without the threat of death..
perhaps to still, to cancel,
the silent screaming,
the greater fear of Finality:
me having to be here
without you
or you having to be here
without me.
Copyright © Barbara Agarwal | Year Posted 2015
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