Dreams are corrosive agents. Although dreams are usually imagined as expressions of unconscious desires or fears, it’s their form that’s most important: a fluid attack on the least secure parts of the psyche’s structures. That this happens while a person is sleeping doesn’t qualify this action but amplifies it. Dream imagery and narrative are secondary to their flow through trembles and tremors.
I want a poetry that’s as corrosive as dreams. I want a poetry that finds vulnerable spots in the facades, and that seeps around or beneath what it can’t confront directly. Poetry is to presumption as sappers are to a castle, as love is to need. Its content is for each constituency to decide; what gets shared is its yearning for freedom.
Dreams have a morality in which no one is right. Their logic comes after the fact. They seek to discover the hidden, without ever finding anything except their own fierce and tender movements. This makes them impervious to categories though not to interpretation. A dream can never be paranoid, but neither does it heal. Like a poem it’s always in between.
This is my poem. Is it as corrosive as a dream? Is a dream as corrosive as a poem? I wonder!
THE PATH
We exit from a crack
in a fertile core
and stumble on the thoroughfare of life.
Tapping a piercing noise
and stretching rumbling feet;
we walk the path.
Charcoal faces, chalk faces.
and faces in between;
at a given time and space,
we all walk the path.
Therefore we exist.
Our real world
begets dreams;
day dreams and night dreams.
I dream,
they dream,
therefore, we exist in both worlds,
the world of reality
and the world of dream.