#surrealreality

How many ships, I wonder,

lay at the bottom of Cape Horn?

their wooden hulls in splinters,

their sails stained and torn,

the skulls of long lost sailors

whose descendants went unborn,

their wives and mothers weeping

forever wondering, forlorn.

And yet they kept on coming

like the sunrise every morn,

loathe to break some solemn oath

or mighty quest to scorn,

driven by the lure of fame

or pledge to country sworn,

but how much sorrow is enough

before a dream is worn?

I sit at my desk inside my office looking

out the window at the deer on the lawn

across the road eating grass, tail twitching,

eating grass, raising his head, looking at

the road, tail twitching, walking towards

the two-lane road, looking at the cars

speeding by, then playfully dancing back

as if outwitting the roaring tubes of steel,

returning to his eating grass, his amber

coat catching the afternoon sun, while I

sit there before my computer on whose

screen floats a spreadsheet that demands

my attention, yet I cannot look away from

the simple drama unfolding outside which

means more to me in that moment than

all the words and data ever written by man

or machine since the dawn of technology,

even as the deer, one last time, turns and

runs away into the woods, vanishing like

a dream, leaving his afterimage in my

You sit there and watch a movie about some war,

maybe the second world war, maybe it’s Vietnam,

or Korea, or Iraq, it doesn’t matter, and it’s about

this kid who got brainwashed into volunteering to

go overseas somewhere and kill people to save his

people, the same story they’ve been telling young

men since time began, whether it’s over the ocean

or over the next hill, and he’s doing his thing with

his buddies, killing enemy soldiers, hiding in dark

woods or blown out buildings, and there’s always

the one office who’s tough as nails but has a heart

of gold, and one day this kid climbs over a garden

wall and gets plugged by an enemy sniper, and so

he’s lying in the grass, bleeding out, pleading for

his mother—because every young man loves their

mother—and we feel awful sorry about it, and we

learn this terrible lesson about the meaning of life

and living each moment as if it might be your last,

but the one thing most people never realize is that

they could have made a whole separate movie for

every enemy soldier that kid shot, that his friends

shot, that anybody has ever shot in every war that

was, because like I said, they all love their mother.

If you have detailed dreams, as I do, you are also

wondering how the mind can envision such intricacy,

such intimately bold landscapes that never existed

and never will, ricocheting epikinetically through

a brain for seconds, perceived for hours, immersing

us so entirely that corporeal reality is contaminated,

bleeding across boundaries, melting clocks into desks,

suns into seas, sounds into colors, past into present,

and somewhere, Salvador is laughing, telling the doves,

A book lying in the grass beside

a country road, its pages flapping

in the turbulence of passing cars

like the wings of some wounded

bird or some whimsical promise

never made, and I can only guess

as to how it ended up there where

no one will ever know its tragedy

or comedy, whichever it contains,

though—considering its uncertain

My town begins where the sidewalk ends

and fields begin, and folks are friends,

and birds do sing, and dogs do bark,

and all the kids play in the park.

But if you look beneath the joy

displayed by every girl and boy,

at night, you’ll hear their horrid screams

for everything’s not what it seems.

For vampires sleep within the cellars,

in sewers lurk subterranean dwellers,

each attic holds an angry ghost,

and the oldest houses hold the most.

Werewolves hunt the local woods,

and bloodstains blot the neighborhood,

dark necromancers cast their spells,

and in the swamp, a monster dwells.

The graveyard’s filled with hungry ghouls,

and kids go missing from their schools,

and parents wonder all day long

what horrid thing might next go wrong.

But since the gas and booze is cheap,

and rental prices aren’t too steep,

and property tax is incredibly low,

no one finds a need to go.

And so the folks just go on living,

ignoring all their dark misgivings;

for, as they say, since cash is king,

Everyone seems so obsessed

with the way they think they look,

especially when they get undressed,

everyone seems so obsessed,

nearly dying to look their best,

and maybe that’s what it took;

everyone seems so obsessed

The train is a curious thing,

these anonymous women and men;

to their privacy, tightly they cling,

ignoring you time and again.

One day, when passion succeeds,

they will sing like the angels unknown,

but once all the madness recedes,