Asleep on a leaf beneath lotus blooms,
Their fragrance floats across the misty lake.
Sudden rain - taps upon the canopy;
Its sound snaps me from sleep to wide awake!
The lotus is beaded with rain droplets --
Like pearls, drops roll together and apart;
The clear blobs coalesce like mercury,
Dripping to the river... back to their start.
They say gorillas are diurnal --
Of this there is a truthy kernel.
They're active daily between naps...
Unless their naps all overlaps.
At the beginning there was a huge drop of milk.
Then Doondari came and he created the stone.
Then the stone created iron;
And iron created fire;
And fire created water;
And water created air.
Then Doondari descended the second time.
And he took the five elements
And he shaped them into man.
But man was proud.
Then Doondari created blindness,
and blindness defeated man.
But when blindness became too proud,
Doondari created sleep,
and sleep defeated blindness;
But when sleep became too proud,
Doondari created worry,
and worry defeated sleep;
But when worry became too proud,
Doondari created death,
and death defeated worry.
But then death became too proud,
Doondari descended for the third time,
And he came as Gueno, the eternal one.
And Gueno defeated death.
NOTE: The Fulani (also known as Fula and Fulbe) are a West African herding tribe that live in Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Guinea, and Senegal.
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
Whenever I want. Now that I’m all grow’d up.
But I do tend toward the lark end of the lark – owl continuum.
the sound of rain
and thundering waterfalls:
a cat sleeps soundly.
The dogs were in a wee hours war:
Growling and snapping and howling,
Breaching night's plutonian shore,
And sweet dreams those barks were fouling.
What monstrous dreamland incursions
That yapping must have brought about.
Bucolic scenes turned perversions
Of bared teeth and menacing snout.
cat on a porch rail
preens between naps
to look good
for the twenty waking
minutes of its day.
snow falls
all night long,
silently piling.
i awaken
to a place
unrecognizable
as the one
in which i took to slumber:
the world's detail erased...
temporarily.
I don't remember my dreams --
not in the middle of the night
and not in the morning.
But, sometimes, I catch a glimpse
at a random instant:
composing a poem,
reflecting on a passage
from a book,
eating a cracker...
But my dreams are like
frightened animals,
turning my attention
directly upon them,
makes them skitter off...,
vanishing into the thicket.
My dreams vanish like they
were never really there,
and I am left wondering
just what I saw.
The harder I try to remember,
the more severely I scrub
my mental hard drive,
purging all shapes and motions,
until my recollection is nothing
but a vague residue of feeling.
I don't KNOW that it was a dream.
I couldn't swear to it.
All I know is that it's an image
that I can't tie to my waking life,
can't tie to any person, place,
or thing I know to be real.
(And, often enough, it's an image
that couldn't exist in the real world.)
I couldn't remember it as a dream,
but - somehow - I intensely FEEL
that it was a dream,
but the Dream is deep down in its hole,
shaking like a critter that
was almost snatched up by
a monster too awful to
contemplate....
and, somehow, I am that monster.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 