The will named a strange executor: a kangaroo. Turns out there's some logic to it:
executors need burglar-skills, and few quadrupeds can climb in bedroom windows...
I'm a courier with a message for the Faerie Queen. Can I avoid all these
colorful, sexy, crazy distractions, and focus on the Studio and the Gong?
One wizardry-classmate summons strange beings; another's learned how not to.
Because some things need to be dealt with alone, where they can't harm......
I have to kiss a mess of cats. Fishy, but I'm not chicken. My real beef is with the humans watching...
Huge gold construction cranes loom over medieval castles. Not rebuilding, but
hoisting knights to the heights. I get a ride up, and see a wide timescape...
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree (at least till that visitor from Porlock barged in)
CAUTION: POET ON PAIN MEDS
We ride on a flying saucer made of stone. Atop the great cliffs, we meet a giant and
warn him not to slip. He doesn't appreciate advice from little alien tourist twerps...
My shamanic teacher lures me into a labyrinth ruled by wizards whose magic-monopoly's about to fall...
Last night I seemed in your embrace; you were about to die.
Today I wake into my place: you immortal, I...
A huge explosion knocked the earth off its orbit; it struck other planets and wrecked the whole
solar system. Where will the souls ready to reincarnate all go? Or do they even need a planet?...
I dream I'm a woman possessed by spirits with yellow eyes that tint the whole world lemon...
I wake, the sun rises, and for a single minute, the world turns that exact, strange yellow...
CAUTION: APPARENT E.S.P.
A dream-fable of lemons who are really orange-people infected by a spore turns out to be about me...
I'm told "Your lives are not in order." The golden crown's too heavy. And
I win my lover's hand--only the hand. What are my dreams accusing me of?
CAUTION: SEVERED HAND, SUBTLE GUILT
I'm pushing a safe off a roof in Berkeley so it won't be pushed off the roof
(yep, you read that right) but it pulls me with it! Either die, or go lucid and fly...
I'm Emily Dickinson reborn in 2100 as a breeder of hydroponic lilies, till my dad drafts me as
an Arctic energy-prospector, where I meet a ghost, a fiery Beast, a new me, and the girl of my dreams...
CAUTION: QUEER-POSITIVE, NUDE PROSPECTORS, GNOMIC DICKINSON QUOTES
I dreamt an epic poem on a sinister ruined city now home
only to reptiles. I woke with at least a hundred lines, but...
I fly through treetops, a lion chasing me. For him it's a game;
he smiles at my tiring. And death is his name...
DREAM: A series of old films with Erroll Flynn looking shy in his glasses, and his... lion suit?
NEXT DAY: Hunting pumas is legalized; the paper shows a sit-in full of people in lion suits...
Half asleep, I scrawl a nightmare of trying to rescue gasping boyfish, but my dreamwriting goes wrong too...
A dream haiku of little devils dancing the conga. What's it mean? Well, check the date...
Dreamt of locked room, door-knob fell off in my hand when I...
THAT DAY: I landed in Japan, but felt an outsider, cut off.
THAT NIGHT: I dreamt a haiku expressing my loneliness...
I save our horses from a fire, but they run back in. Then it's
my family I must save from themselves. At last, it's my turn...
The Lord Chancelor can't sleep, and when at last he does, he drifts through nightmares full of baby lawyers
and potted tradesmen sprouting fruit, and cutthroat corporate scheming. But that's Victorian dreaming!
A glowworm and nightwatch beetle help out a lost crying ant-woman. It's not always a bug-eat-bug world...
I'm at a fancy wedding on Mars, I think, but slowly realize
the black sky and huge blue ball mean this lawn is on...
...the Moon. In the open. What are we breathing? Well... old money, I think.
An avian friend of mine researches a whirlpool. But it doesn't want to be studied, and it has friends too...
My dentist (a Haitian Mafia leader) sends a message to my dad (also a Mafia don) by dental cruelty....
The image got lost, but the words survived, so here's the poetic saga of an ant that left th' farm...
I roamed the mansion of the dead, my heart athrob with terror, lest
I see faces, not human, that once shone on me with familiar love...
DAY: I read an exposé on "Senoi dreamwork"--the Malaysian Senoi people disavow it. Some white guy just made it up!
DREAM: I'm a dream researcher in Malaysia. A manta-squid attacks! Now the "Senoi" focus on my needs makes sense...
CAUTION: TENTACLE-RAPE ATTEMPT
A black anchor floats in the sky to the east. Impossible cities rise on mountaintops, only to erupt in flame.
The sea rises to drown them. On a plank, I ride the flood. In the ruins, I find angelic statues--who wake...
My friend Mark and I climb the Path of Righteousness to the summit where he finds a big red watermelon.
He rolls it down the Path of Righteousness, knocking businessmen aside like bowling pins! Why? Well...
My friend Mark is ready. He evaporates into the spirit realm--as we all do here when we die! Flesh to glass to air...
Martian robots pester me. I flee through the Asteroids, leaving chaos, cratering Earth.
Years later on my farm, a bot shows up disguised as Freud. I start mudslinging...
A mare's brought in to save a rare bloodline. She's young but as extraordinary as her mate: part filly, part feline...
I'm a kid imprisoned in an empty stone castle. Squeeze through a stone slit, and prepare to drop ten feet
down the face of a great stone gate. But I go lucid, and my dream and waking body-senses conflict...
As a kid I was haunted by the parallels between Menolly of Pern and me...
I meet a cult worshiping a mermaid who just wallows in a puddle, teaching
her followers absolutely nothing; she just wants admiration for her looks...
CAUTION: CARTOON BREASTS
An ancient Mesopotamian city learned to make catapult-bombs of powdered
manure. But excessive stockpiles & bad housekeeping led to Armageddung...
CAUTION: BABEL-MYTH DEBASED
I had to deliver a message from the gods. Not that I understood its meaning!
I arrived at your home, and found I liked and envied your big, warm family. ..
Wayan dreams he and his sister grope toward sex in the kitchen, when two of her friends burst in...
Miriel dreams she's having sex with a boy from her choir, when two of her friends burst in...
CAUTION: FRUSTRATION, INCEST, CAUGHT IN SEX
Tibetan prayers for good weather are answered too well. Heat wave! Tourists fly in, but planes can't land--
melting glaciers flood the airstrips. So tourists eager to sunbathe in Tibet strap on parachutes, prepare to jump...
You say you're leaving me. I go to grab an ice pick to stab you, but my hand
freezes to the ice block on the stair--I dare not even dream of murder. Since...
CAUTION: RESPONSE TO SPOUSAL SUICIDE
Inspired by a bird who weaves her nest of dollar bills, I become a sort of monk,
sweeping, renouncing wealth--but my monastery's a Silicon Valley BART station...
Dinner with the Lightbulb Heads. When we leave, the Mood Elevators welcome us...
but won't let us out! And in the struggle to escape, heads will roll--and shatter...
CAUTION: HARSH WORDS ON WESTERN MEDICINE
A new Eve asks the Time Commission to send her and her baby back to Ethiopia
45,000 years ago. But they're shy Moomintrolls, not humans...
The foul old fossil woman had carved and burnt her own flesh in the name of art;
we washed her till she was reborn young. It was my turn next to enter the water...
My dreams support a radical break from my past--to let go of possessions and friends in a cross-country move...
Inside my brain's a fractured legislature--a hive-mind where da beez disagreez...
In Palo Alto I meet strange musicians in the rain, and realize kitsune aren't born but made...
A dream haiku telling of a dog-pack saved by the intuition of a mutt with a mangled ear...
I commute to my dreamjob on a four-story bus; then my baby brother
(who I wouldn't let eat any chocolate pudding) utters a new poem by William Blake...
I lie on the bottom of the pool. The life guard lifts me in his strong arms. We flirt till my legs fuse, ready to go deep;
but he says "It's only a part-time job" and turns away. In day, the highschool pool lies empty, widowed of water...
My glass heart survived the rocket's blast, but I'm stranded on this barren world.
Wrapped in glamor, we climb a steep forbidding stair into a rosy, fake tomorrow...
a dream-poem provoking a 2008/9/16 dream by Chris Wayan
I was in my mother's closet, trying on her outfits, and trapped in Hamlet, too...
At the library, my boss says we're restructuring, modernizing. My new job is to...
It takes time to build yourself out of found objects and trash...
Renewing one's life has its costs. What if you can't pay the price? A dreamlet of warning and shame...
I keep feeling I'm a reincarnated rainforest creature just passing for human. When all I want is...
CAUTION: TOBACCO
A voice calls to me by name--but not the name I now bear, evoking memories of another life...
For a week the same dream-figures and settings have been recurring:
shapeshifters and sea monsters. What are they hiding? Or guarding...
ESP is like having neutrino detectors for eyes: what radiates from people's cores blinds you to their surfaces...
DREAM: on a Nevada ranch, I'm a were-horse into mares--when I'm human. And when I'm a stallion?
Why, cowgirls! Always date the wrong species--just to be sure of rejection.
NEXT DAY: I let a class of commercial artists critique my dream-comix. Just to be sure of rejection...
CAUTION: FURRYPHILIA, SELF-SABOTAGE
A poem linking the dawn of digital art to early, tinny phonographs, cranky film cameras...
CAUTION: IDEAS
My friend Nic vows to paint two pictures a day, and, impossibly, does.
Meanwhile, I'm blocked. Can she show me how to get unstuck?
A joyous day with a strange woman who seems not to be his wife, until he touches her hand and knows...
Every night the same nightmare--the creatures take flight again, and I wake shaking...
A woman unreachable, in dream, drowning in the bed, fish-gasping, scissoring, while her man oblivious...
No Man is Island. So Men say. I am not a Man...
I want to catch a crescent moon home--our transit system's been buying up
old moons and running them across town--but tourists reserved all the seats...
I met two transparent spooks who insist "We're not ghosts! We were never human."
I'm sure they're wrong; they've just forgotten. But I phone a witch, who confirms...
My sister & I swim round a weirdly shrunken Pacific. Near Fiji, we blunder too close to the drain...
I visited my friend Chris Wayan's workshop and found him building
a dance troupe of joyfully obscene centaurs out of Barbie dolls...
In my dream I walk through golden glowing woods; I wake to a soggy London November...
At the beach I dive into deep water to save my drowning friend Kathy, and find it’s not so clear who’s who...
In an Oakland literary salon (no, not an oxymoron) I'm supposed to
write an ode. But it's so hot, and I have surreal dreams to sketch...
Keats met two winged lovers nesting in the woods: Eros and Psyche, the last Olympians, worshipless...
Softly snows the spam upon my lonely brain, quilting me in flounderdrifts. Shovel it again...
I'm biking over the English Channel. So mild & easy after the Greenland-to-New-York run...
I'm a lonely bird flying in a glass office. Seeking friends, seeing reflections, I fly into windows.
Ow! There's hope of escape only where no false friend beckons...
I'm a spy tracking down coinlike bombs. Fighting a double agent, I fall in love!
So I suggest her gang rob golden-parachute bankers...
CAUTION: POOLSIDE SEX
I hung the dream-net over my bed. It worked. A blue-winged man with a leg of silver came to me,
drummed, danced, offered to teach me secrets. Awake, I found a blue feather caught in that net...
In her kitchen she offers me shortcake. She's short herself, for she gives away all
to everyone--only her bodiless head is left...
As I bike home at night, strange doings--a rat is sacrificed; gemstones delivered;
an astronaut shows glowing alien objects; a second rat becomes a... firefighter?
You'd think his Christmas wish would be "a new eye"; well it was, in a way...
My day life as an artist and explorer of the San Francisco underground scene
gets regularly commented on by my dreamlife...
CAUTION: SEX, BONDAGE
Kate Wolf sings that ads are way dirtier than porn. But my memory slowly twists her message...
I'm in a movie version of prehistoric Baja California, mining nuggets that howl,
when pterodactyl-worshiping pirates glide in trying to snatch our ore...
While conducting a census of fairies in Golden Gate Park, I fall in love
with an abused oriole-girl, and we try to heal one another...
CAUTION: AWKWARD SEX
A kinky seduction slips into something more uncomfortable: the Qabbalah? Or possibly leather...
CAUTION: EROTICA OR ESOTERICA?
A suspicious exobiologist warns me that otter from Titan may not be the amiable, nerdy celebrity it seems. But...
I'm trapped in the scary show The Outer Limits. A man scolds me: "You think not, but you MATTER!"
I try suicide rather than face my worth! But my dream fences off the river, forcing me to confront...
CAUTION: SUICIDE ATTEMPT
After lifeline and heartline, the palm-reader points to a rope ladder heading for Orion. I climb. But
it goes brittle, splinters. I flail. She reads, long-distance, one more line: "Wings", she calls. "Wings."
My last two businesses went bust. So I let a giant parrot talk me into interviewing
her people, who've been settling all those alien ruins in Amazonia. Great career move...
Martial-arts student Parvati just won't fight the teacher she loves (too much!)--
not even for her final exam. Instead she gets a rotary saw and...
We're stuck in an empty town whose streetnames are all emotions. And they change.
Rage becomes Giggle. Tedium, Terror! Devious town...
At a strange gate between worlds with high and low sea levels,
a meddling spirit prods me to clear a path for a salt torrent...
Haiku by Roswila of a dream of meeting a winged horse, illustrated by her late friend Janet...
Turns out my life's a TV show. My scriptwriter is half pegasus, half dragon,
and my own humanity has been her science-fictional imagination all along...
CAUTION: FURRY NUDITY
Talking animals flood my bedroom. Well, they'll talk to me--but they're cliquish.
Hippos snub cats snub bears snub deer, and no one talks to penguins, for...
I put a singles ad in our paper, but I just couldn't say what I really wanted to. Now, I can...
CAUTION: SEX, DRUGS, AND DOGGEREL
I don't understand this poem's symbolism or even its style. It came to me whole, in a dream...
As a boy on Martinique, Jean-Luc Picard wished for so much so hard, his angels have to work overtime...
A man I loved goes into the Jungian depths, but when his anima appears in the mirror-pool, his nerve fails...
I'm in heaven. But... what can you do up here? And it's so small. Where is everyone?...
CAUTION: WE FIND OUT
Plums float through the autumn air, sending us airmail kisses. If we'll accept delivery...
Two mimes terrorize our art class in a stretchable bear-suit. Well, we HOPE it's just a suit...
Will you walk in the fields, love? / Let us be gone.
The tall grass will wave to thee / Fairest one...
I meet the terrible Power Behind the Gods. I don't like it. So I get my squirtgun & shoot its butt.
The enraged Power chases me as blindly as I hoped! I jump into a secular universe, and...
CAUTION: SACRILEGE
At a museum, a weird art project shows me how observing and documenting life
in art can improve that life--just from being taken seriously...
Smallpox is extinct. No need to worry. But the pocked face of the rising moon reminds me
malice, madness, incompetence and black-market greed, our four horsemen, aren't extinct...
CAUTION: ODE TO SMALLPOX, WHAT DO YOU EXPECT?
Three big tap-dancing kidnappers is too many to fight. So I try admiring their kidnapping technique...
I'm a detective sent to a research station two billion years ago. The ancient atmosphere isn't just anoxic, but deadly...
I get stuck with a one-year mandatory gig as President of the
World, just as Saudi Arabia collapses, and fools rush in...
Suddhodana dreams of great upheavals; no courtier can interpret the dream.
An ascetic claims the upheaval will be for the good, then... turns into an owl?!
CAUTION: PERHAPS NOT ENTIRELY ACCURATE
I dreamed our family's black cat Persephone had to make a life-decision...
A monster's out to eat my dog--and maybe me. We get cornered in the barn...
I'm a telepathic rabbit defending our world from space-laser attack. We do, but do we modernize too much?
CAUTION: IDEAS
In the Cave of the Ant Ambassador, I meet his mate, a beautiful translucent fox named
Raethe. Way happier with her mate (& body!) than in that dream just two months ago...
Millay dreams her lover’s attacked in the street, and wakes to realize it’s already happened; he’s lost.
The wildcat Rare Bit Fiends slinks out of the hills to stalk and maul
dreamers--until one day she rears up to teach a dream workshop...
My parents invite me out to dinner, but there's a rattlesnake under the table,
and my mom chases it up my leg. I wake to find two holes in my knee...
How do we make dream narratives readable, when so many
readers are brainwashed to think they're nonsense?
These days I'm doubtful about both an afterlife AND utter extinction.
Was Shakespeare wrong about what gets buried, what lives on?
Famine. Our Tibetan monastery's prayers are answered. A caravan of yaks comes over the pass, bearing...
Lounging in the sun, I do a magical make-over--molding my bones to give myself more room for
intuition, judgment, nerve--all the while feeling shallow & indulgent for self-improving!...
A horde of demented dwarves invades Market Street, jumping up & down, shaking the skyscrapers...
I'm single and feeling shy. So I asked my dreams for an image of my true love, and got...
CAUTION: SEX
I tossed the crystal decanter of my self into the river, and watched it float away...
Blake was broke. Couldn’t typeset Songs of Innocence and Experience.
But in a dream, his brother advised him...
Jeffers, that harsh, visionary, ecological poet, seems drunk on Darwinism,
blind to kindness--or is he just reporting Big Sur's true, mean spirit(s)?
CAUTION: LITERARY AND MYSTICAL
A proud angry picture-poem during a hard time, when great gifts flowed through my hands...
In a bar I meet a guy who claims the Army hired him to try
to inspire crops to grow taller by marching tall soldiers past...
I was a robot who had a soul--till the Reagans stole it! I track them down, and
demand it back. Simply confronting them works--the hole inside me is filled...
CAUTION: CAUSTIC POLITICS
Think of your dreams as a rainforest, clearcut every morning--unless you make the effort to remember...
CAUTION: TINY NAKED ANGELS
New moons appear. I try to mash them into a spare Earth, but botch the orbits.
So now, runaway moons rumble down a steep San Francisco hill...
CAUTION: ALWAYS SET PARKING BRAKE
The unemployed angel with her resume is the Goddess of Freedom...
I find myself sitting on toy trains and fake snow as I'm told a fable:
how a herd of department-store Santas got tragically lost in a blizzard...
I meet a female Bigfoot, who, to my surprise, quietly speaks my tongue.
She's mourning the death of her infant son...
A hard-hitting rap on Satan's dumbest disguise. Yet he's gotten away with it! The shocking truth...
CAUTION: LANGUAGE! SACRILEGE! MUCILAGE! (FOR THE BIG WHITE BEARD)
A sorceror's apprentice describes a medical procedure her teacher plans.
Yow! I sure wouldn't trust anyone to try that on ME...
CAUTION: TALK OF BLOOD AND SEX
I dreamed my lover was metal inside. I was sure it meant he had no passion.
I told him. Why did he bitterly ask me to stare into my dream like a mirror?
CAUTION: TROUBLED RELATIONSHIP
The past. Burma. I'm shown a stupa covered in gold leaf, and given a key
to a tunnel where they say a tooth of Buddha is encased in glass...
I give plastic sandwich bags to people in Tibet. They go wild for them.
Shortage! An air shipment from Delhi breaks open; Tibetans with butterfly nets...
In a pizzeria, customers walk blindly through a ghost; briefly possessed, they
echo his moods. But for such an insubstantial figure, he seems strangely stable...
Animal poets at an open mic. My turn! And I find... I'm one. A creature without grammar...
A summer love affair with a shapeshifting alien turns awkward when she gets a high fever, and...
CAUTION: UGH!
When I was being battered, I dreamed where it would end
if I didn't leave: dead wife, shot husband...
CAUTION: DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
by Daughn Lee and Roswila; 1999 (2000?), a collaborative dream-poem
Alternating stanzas by very different poets, based on
Roswila's dream of bellydancing in the streets...
An Arab shows me a stone he calls a book, and a prophetic shell that warns of a flood rushing toward us...
My dreams are made of lovely carvable jade. Too bad my tools and skills suit our plastic age...
I play the lovers in a teen romance: shy abused boy, insecure girl. But I get tired of the script, and...
CAUTION: LANGUAGE
I dream I'm trying to understand how I write poetry, but then I recall my daughter's sick
from a bad prescription. So I try to research her illness, but our library's renovating...
A love poem to the black mare I keep meeting in my dreams, who finally married me...
CAUTION: SEX TALK
As my friends & I walk in a marsh, we argue. They know humans can't fly--
so I levitate on the spot! But, oddly, they convince me I can't--while I am...
From a crowd in a gym, I sing to my wolflike alien friend. But she can't recognize my voice--
too convincing a falsetto! I slide deeper, but once she heard a girl, she can't imagine...
Day: an exhibitionist teen uses sex to sell charity cupcakes, while her mom glares...
Dream: I date the exhibitionist, but her dad imposes weird trials, as I sing for courage...
(a poem answering Wallace Stevens's 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird)
As the beast in question (and recalling the fable Six Blind Men and the Elephant)
I don't mind letting six half-blind humans have their say--as long as I get my own...
CAUTION: UNICORNS
I get assigned a life as a skink. Eat flies, mate, do my lizard pushups, but
behind my daily mind, my soul gets so bored it finally flies out...
My neurotic sister and I both lust for a girl named Sky; then I flee a gang of popes and lamas and mullahs...
While watching two rooftop actors (one a chicken) I noticed the icebergs in the sky were melting at last...
tolen by the Fairy Queen, I'm made nurse to her great project: creating life! But her synthetic baby is...
I dream I'm an insomniac trapped in a flat full of snoring writers and reporters. Wait a minute...
I cross San Francisco on public transit--a network of children's slides. One leads into...
A wormhole full of aliens, where a goofy-haired reporter interviews a hacker...
My friend and I are banana slugs on the forest floor. We wander out into chaparral, and across a bike path...
Things start materializing in my house: first three tiny naked scientists, then a huge impossible fruit...
CAUTION: NUDE SCIENTISTS
I'm a werewolf-girl in love with a gender-dysphoric weredragon in love with
a man who's very, very patient with all our crazy shiftiness...
CAUTION: NUDITY (SKIN, FUR and SCALE), SHIFTY PEOPLE (BI, WERE and QUEER)
I dream of snowdrifts too deep to get back home, even though...
I set out in a dream / To go away / Away is hard to go, but no one / Asked me to stay...
Millay, suffering from nightmares, decides to speak from Nightmare's point of view...
A joyful song about ignoring your critics. The last stanza came verbatim from the dream...
In a desert crawling with aliens who can absorb your mind, I propose a truce, and gain...
Africa. My horse trusted me as we faced lions and fire, but to face the Soul-Board, he must trust himself...
In a creepy castle on the Rhine, whenever I'm near three women, they blur
into one. A powerful spell! Now where have I seen this effect...?
CAUTION: DISSES PATRIARCHAL RELIGIONS
Night. I'm scared of the men in the park--till I see they're all gay. I dance,
and as darkness flares to dawn, remember how to fly--regain my falcon-wings...
Lost in the rainforest of Olympic National Park, I stumble into the wrong cabin:
the hut of Time herself. Or is she? She asks me to clean up, but spare her web...
Divers made of ice win the Traffic-Leaping Olympics. But
I think they cheated! I seek my friend the Sphinx...
A street poet preaches a gospel of smallness, until he pokes at capitalism in a slightly too personal way...
Squirrel Girl and I try to find a private room, but Hal the mad computer in 2001
spies on us and our spaceship captain orders us to clean the ion tubes...
CAUTION: SQUIRREL NUDITY
I defeat the knife-wielder, in spite the blade in my belly I can't pull out. I may have to let it be...
I dreamed my stepmother moved in with my dead grandparents...
A stone bridge, at the crossing of a road and a river. A signal sign indicates the name of the place: (YOU)...
A picture-poem experiment: one dream per stanza!
Five short dreams exploring the weight of culture on our animal selves...
Bishop is being driven mad by insomnia... until predawn birdsong wakes her,
and she discovers she's been dreaming of insomnia... maybe.
Through twin gates of dream--not ivory and horn any more, but fear and trust...
Three castles on the sea: a Mock Kremlin, a Ship of Toiletpaper, and a Ship of Brick and Beer...
A mad old surfer of the San Andreas Fault, impossibly riding earth-change...
Skimming over the lake on surface tension as two sharks prowl beneath, I'm not sure who's fishing for whom...
The past. Summer. Sunset. I want to sneak in a final
swim--in someone else's forbidden backyard pool...
I pull my mom's sweater onto my legs but get tangled (and bits of anatomy dangle).
Worse, I'm emulating Jesus. Is this any way to get a date?
CAUTION: WARDROBE MALFUNCTION, GENDER MALFUNCTION, MOM MALFUNCTION
I like bad taste. Taste always tasted like another Anglo conspiracy to keep me from having fun...
The Conference on Love has two sexy speakers. One says
"my teacher's stalking me" but she clings to him. Love? Hate? Both?
CAUTION: EXHIBITIONISM--but what are these two exhibiting?
A beer-soaked cowboy barbecue goes wrong when a dog named Teri Garr catches fire
and they just laugh and won't waste beer to douse her. Then their big old hats catch fire...
CAUTION: SEXIST BLAMING OF VICTIM; PROBABLE DEATHS BY FIRE
A stallion reared to strike me. He was all the fear and rage I’d repressed... A woman said “offer him...
The ship carrying my mom to America sails on, as I drown in the sea;
They strap me down to pull out the pieces of my stillborn baby Obdale;
A family/gang called Thanotos invites me to join them...
CAUTION: MISCARRIAGE, DEATH
Nightmares can warn. But when awake, what warning can you get from nonstop ill-luck?
A workmate said "They feed they lion"; two dreams later, the poem emerged as you see it...
CAUTION: POLITICAL RAGE, SURREALISM
Those Hollywood lovers in the tub seem perfect together, until... oh, read the title!
CAUTION: RACE- AND GENDER-BENDING
Dreams of my childhood--bootlegger dad, critical mom, gun-
happy uncles, slaughtered squirrels, slaughtered Jews...
Did sex turn creepy because I sensed the madman stalking us? Or did our sin (casual sex) summon him?
CAUTION: CREEPY SEX, CREEPIER PREMONITIONS
My father's trapped in a crashed car. But I'm distracted by a young man whose palm cups a living flame...
I watch Disney animate the Legend of the Thousand Birds, who pull
a wireframe sleigh of light right through a dark, material Santa...
Dead fish in a poisoned stream, dead kittens in a pit...
and advice from the woman who revives them with a touch.
Worldwide, hands have gone soft and pliable. I meet
some animals evolving into people and advise them....
I buy a charming ruin in the woods. Newlywed tigers prowl! The tiger bride
tells me "He expects predictability. But I'll show him what a tiger really is..."
A tiger-couple on an ice floe must choose: swim for land, or
ride the current full circle back home, risking starvation?
In a city crawling across a marshy world, I find a detonating bomb frozen in a time-ball.
Why not detonate it somewhere harmless, why carry this around?
A toy's delivered, unasked. A jumping jack. It tries to eat me! I defeat it but then peer in the box to be sure...
Four lines of comic nonsense composed in a dream...
I loved the feel of the green snake, and reassured my friends it wasn't poisonous, but really...
A voice tells me I have 100 months to live. I vow it'll be enough to finish my work here...
CAUTION: THAT VOICE WAS WRONG
Simultaneous dreams sharing mood & theme not images.
Yeats sees but cannot touch the waterfall he loved so in childhood;
Georgie, the magical white stag in King Arthur...
Climbing a mountain on Mars, I reach a hall where I'm transformed into a cryophilic being.
Then I feast on methane soup with the heroic Martian dead...
A couple slips in and out of sleep, dreams, one another's bodies and dreamworlds, trying to connect...
CAUTION: FREUDIAN SYMBOLISM, LITERATE WRITING
A dog implausibly large, with fur the color of rose-quartz, wanted me to follow her...
In the border-mountains, there is a Trumpeter. His clear, triadic melodies break out through the frosty air,
or through the swirling mists. No one knows whether the Trumpeter is theirs or ours...
Alchemy demands I kill ten swallows. I refuse! Instead, twelve birds and I fuse and fly over a magic wood...
You get 26 dice with letters on every face. Roll them all. Your haiku must use every letter. Go!
I led a blind man through a vast art museum underground. But guiding him, I too was blind to the beauty...
She tells me there's a stream under the floor, upstairs. Peel back the carpet, pry up the boards. An icy creek.
Trout. She brings me a fishing rod. But the fish say they're too young to die. I feel such guilt and grief...
The dream land was beautiful, but seemed empty 'til I heard piping voices.
An elven band! I gazed in wonder. But they could not (would not?) see me...
THAT DAY: art nonstop! Put myself down for obsessing. Empty man!
THAT NIGHT: I'm in rural China. Two women tell me their village declared them
dead, killed by demons. So are they ghosts, or just written off by idiots?
MORNING: wait--have I been calling me dead? Oh...
My family home's invaded by ancient Egyptian architects. So
I put on my unicorn mask and eavesdrop on their plans...
Jealous of newlyweds, I grind my teeth. But the Ice Age ground the Sierra's granite teeth, and they're lovelier for it...
I meet a giant squirrel. But a Committee condemns the squirrel for such long periods
of unproductive hibernation. The squirrel points out a teensy flaw...
All I know about humans, I learned in psychodrama. I gawked as caterpillars grew wings. Except me...
My art mentors turn on me! My mom the painter says I'm genetically inferior,
and then my art teacher Verity sits on my head (ow!) and chants...
Trapped in a blend of Joan of Arcadia and The Tempest Tales, I'm tired of being the pratfall sidekick...
Robot wolves with videocamera eyes prowl our block, freezing me
in their headlight glare. Why do I think one's my ex-girlfriend?
We lose control of our new time machine, which seems to have its own agenda...
CAUTION: CONTEMPLATION OF SUICIDE, CHRONOLOGICALLY IMPAIRED DREAMER
I dreamt Anacreon the poet reeled with drink and lust--and I am wild and wanton like to him...
Two archangels meet; one red and gold winged, one blue and green. In heaven, form reveals
worldview. Yet these two souls in dispute are great; rather than fight they appreciate...
DAY: our ex-cat comes back, needing surgery. Dad doesn't want to pay. Big quarrel.
DREAM: Cats, birds, elf-girls; in their asteroid library, a tale of oath-breaking...
Now I'm the one who stole a tooth of jade from the volcano hall. Greed... erupts!
CAUTION: NUDE BIRD-ELF, DEATH BY LAVA
A road trip through New Mexico mutates into a tour of my relationship disasters...
In a Tibetan monastery on an ancient lakebed, I swim through a vast sunken library.
Books open like sea anemones, letters float to the surface like kelp...
After a peace march in San Francisco, I saw us as deer, and Americans as dogs. Yet WE frighten THEM...
I was dead. A weed grew from my heart; then two streams poured out--not
water or blood but experiences. I asked the weed what it was doing, and it said...
My sister just bought a biocomputer: an enslaved human brain in a box of weeping skin...
I meet my own muse--the muse of all of us, perhaps--scooping water from a sacred well...
I'm a girljock waiting to see a movie when a weredog in line involuntarily shifts
from dog to human, and a Berkeley radical takes offense at the symbolism...
CAUTION: SNIPPY ABOUT POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
I'm stuck on a runaway bus. So we decide to picture the axle falling off, and
it obeys! But the bus zooms on, carried by a horde of little animals...
CAUTION: ESP SKEPTICS WILL LOATHE THE AFTERWORD (true story, though)
I'm living in an England rendered in chalk. We wander the woods with butterfly nets,
ritually hunting the White Deer--if that's what they really are...
I'm a Chinese kid fleeing the Japanese Occupation in 1938. As we near San Francisco,
I wake to find it's all my dad's dream. Wait--he's alive again? But he was never a refugee.
Is it a pastlife memory? If so, whose--his or mine?
My sister's fiancé Billy died a year ago. I didn't realize how deep the grief ran till I dreamed...
Hot air rises, right? So there's a monsoon from Hell,
lifting souls. Lucky for us that gravity balances it...
I slay the beautiful dragon attacking us, despite my regret.
And then, as I sleep, glowing eyes advance on our keep AGAIN...
Wingless, I try hard to fly, arm-flapping wild. And I rise! Flight's in the mind. But I'm leaving my friend behind! Guilt ties me down--till I see...
I was flying south so it was autumn, numberless autumn with its leaves already far below me...
A woman I had wronged set her pit bull on me! Hand in its jaws, I gave in, and we both began crying...
My job's to feed the wolves downtown with the heads of tuna-human hybrids; I mystify the pack
with a blend of skating, ballet and rope tricks. Wait, could this work on scary humans, too?
Miniaturized, smuggled over a border inside a she-wolf's mouth, I long
for where I got briefly hidden--her labia. But healing first, sex later!
CAUTION: FURRY SMUT; WEIRD SCIENCE (BUT REAL!)
I often dream of words forming on a page as their images dance around me. Here's an example...
This man comes into the chapel, makes a fascist salute, catches fire, and burns right down to his shoes...
Emily Dickinson ties up a worm she mistrusts. Bad move! It grows into a talking snake with a score to settle...
Sharks unicorns and moonbeams / Lost loves and karma chocolate I-beams
Raw telepathic bundles of beans / Write a little dream with me...
Our dilemma is, now that we have the power to get what we want... what exactly was it we wanted?
You cannot stay forever / on this side of the river
with darkness coming over / and salt has lost its savor...