Memory of a dream 2008-09-11
I ache for the touch
of a song upon my lips,
of the tingle at the tips
of my fingers when I'm taken
by a muse, and then awaken
to the tendrils of a dream
in which I ken I'd something more
I write, and the song
grows like smoke-streams in my mind –
still so thin, and I so blind;
and I grasp, but in that motion
it is gone, and I've a notion
that if I would catch a dream
maybe I ought still myself more
I breathe, and again
there's that feel under the skin
as if seeing through a thin
sheen of nothing, into something
that I knew, but in waking
was like shadows of a dream
which then by daylight seem no more
I still, and begin,
knowing not when I'll be done –
with an echo in the air
as my guidance, be it bare,
to a place past the horizon,
where what here is but a dream
awake could live again once more.
This is probably the first poem I've written in which I actually intended and shaped the *sound* of it. Usually what I've written is purely textual, to me.
The last paragraph is meant to allude to an earlier set of poems I wrote entitled The Calm, in particular Alchemy, the first and best one of them. In a way, this is a better take on Memory.
For inspiration, I have the soundtrack to the musical Spring Awakening (e.g. The Guilty Ones @ 2m40s), and the feel of Alex's skin on mine as a catalyst of the thought. Plus the usual background, of half-forgotten magic, which is all too true (if hard to explain to any who have not known it themselves). I wonder sometimes, which is the dreaming and which awake...
To Alex and Tiki, thus, I dedicate this poem.
The poem is self-descriptive; I sat down with that longing, knowing only that I had something to get out, and that that process itself was the topic.
I realize in retrospect that I messed up the rhyme in the fourth stanza, but ah well, I'll leave it be. I was aiming more for the meter anyhow.
