DREAMS SACRED AND PROFANE

Our petrified existence with the dead
Haunts wakeful nights like cocktail memories
Sour with the senseless things we did or said.

'What is the Lear,' wrote Coleridge, 'the Othello
But a divine dream?' - thinking poetry
To be a dream the dreamer rationalised.

But to the author it's no thing of art,
The dream in which he always plays a part:
Merely a run of boobs he can't expunge.

Why should he make the dead come back in dreams;
And re-enact their hurt and his neglect?
Slumbering or not, unsatisfactory nights!

Between the boiler-house and garden-shed
September mornings trail a filament
Across my brow: this year a prelude to
...