Notes from Exile: Dreams
Log/Verse: daily reflections from prison, written every morning at my bunk. Part poem, part log book.
Written in prison, these poems approach dreams from opposite directions—one looking back through memory, the other forward into nightly return.
Dreams
That other dreaded
world.
Not our real
world,
but more real than
our real
world.
And no one to reconcile
their ambiguous
codes.
Each night I close
my eyes,
dreading their troubling
reels.
Dreaming
I used to dream of wolves chasing a little boy.
My mother told me there are no wolves.
And then I dreamed of a girl, my sisters’ friend,
Julia, I think. She had no clothes.
I didn’t understand.
When I grew up, I dreamed of different things,
chasing me just the same,
until I became the Wolf.
And then I dreamed of getting lost,
in caves and tunnels and nowhere out.
Now an old man, I dream of things I can’t remember:
Pale familiar images that waking leaves in
dark and unfamiliar clues.
For readers interested in longer reflections on justice, incarceration, and exile, my essays are linked here at Minutes Before Six..
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