By: Harrison Abbott

To wake, so many times under the canopy of non-sleep;
Dreams held in bizarre crossroads, lashed piers, burnt woodlands,
Wherein the clowns reside and horsebacked men tap their pistols.

Dreams rocked by ladies’ words from their reptile lips,
Over the pink hills where epics forget their plot climaxes,
Where the kings and small heroes alike burst their hay barrels.

By dreaming the peasants are for once chinking their pennies,
Misinterpreting their landowners and driving through the bluebells
The graft of their ale and the sad pictures of grazing livestock.

To wake is to rubs one’s eyes of the necessary grit multiplied
By sleep where the unnecessary quips from childhood reign high,
Where banished loves tremble in their hard exits as if still there.

Characters are awoken from decades past holding their clockfaces
Up like the hands that keep ticking upon them strike church bells
With every maddening meddling second never pausing to pass by.

There are animals too which always seem to have their claws bare;
Whom lose their innocence by adopting inclusions on a human Cast,
Contributing each line of dialogue with nasal tones and silly charm.

When will this all stop? the parked preacher says as he falls around
So erratically by the idle catastrophe of sleep because he fears it
And cannot stand it with its trick question in brain chemical harm.

It can’t stop and he cannot regulate his slept chapters stuttering;
Never has he done and should he really regret it when such spates
Of words and the pantomime rush of the modern age keeps on pulsing?

Where else would the play recruit its medieval staff with its
Plastic lights and sticky floors and backroom powder and painted
Axes which hack so readily the plot pills which enliven our lives?

It’s like saying that the jungles that you’ll never go to will
Never be accessible in your dreams where the audio screams with
Full tilt the clangour of the parrots and mosquitoes sparking rain.

The same for the mountainsides where footprints waver in the snow,
Or the brown rivers amok with Eastern smog sharing rivalries of ego,
Or the wooded castles where royalties bicker with national fame.

Long ocean waves with each crest hysterical by your stranded demise;
Purple steppes of middle continents ghostly with boot-clacks roving;
Hilly pine woodlands stretching into sapped religion with evergreen;
Abandoned bus stops of fallen empires that once linked ideals apart;
Surreal bouts in the desert where the beetles churn water by dawn;
Islands with stood-off edges where the birds hold parliament eternal;
Dazed domino tenements in the sun lingering by forgotten suburbs;
The wrecked beauty of the planet shorn in green and blue maps

Which alone is enough to save the mind of a young man who still
Wakes at least partially each day outside of his yomping outer world.