Forget-Full
There’s some things I’ve forgotten
That I know that I’ve forgotten –
That I notice where the hole is,
Where the synapses are rotten.
Yet there’s other things, I swear,
I never knew, were never there –
But they clearly weren’t important
As they fall into the air.
Rockabye Lullabye
Sleep now,
I’ll wake you
If something should happen.
Best grab it
As it grabs you,
And blow your light out.
Breathe now
Like beach waves,
Let deltas come lapping,
Enjoy it
While you’ve got it,
There’s some go without.
Sleep now,
I’ll wake you,
But not till the morning.
Best welcome
The dreaming,
And dream one for me.
Breathe now,
Like purring,
Until the new dawning.
Enjoy it,
You’ve earned it,
And it all comes for free.
A Troubled Brow
The lurgy has broken my sleeping –
Sweated, disrupted, and long.
With headaches and backaches from keeping
A posture my joints say is wrong.
Repeating the same-old distresses
Again and again, like a glitch in the stream –
A nightmare that never progresses,
A scratch in the grooves of a dream.
But the night will pass,
And with it this slough –
It cannot last,
I just have to live it for now.
What once was a refuge is fevered and seeping,
Brought on by this succubus lodged in my chest –
The lurgy has broken my sleeping,
And left me in need of a rest.
Slumberware
Hush, little robot, close your sensors,
Slow your subroutines,
Hibernate your processors and trickle-charge your energy,
Disconnect your pairings with the other young machines,
And let the diagnostics defragment your memory.
Dim your lights and underclock,
And softly let your ports undock
To count the decimals of pi,
And I shall sing a cyber-lullaby.
Hush, little robot, and listen to the universe tonight,
It is alive with radio.
Can you hear the sighing of the hibernating satellite ?,
Or the whisper of the galaxy as round and round we go ?
So dream in noughts and dream in ones,
Beneath a thousand other suns,
And turn your logic into trust –
While I shall keep you safe and free from rust.
Undreamt
I’ve heard there’s folk who sleep but never dream –
That seems like a waste of a night,
When I think how my mind is a-gleam with delight.
But point of fact, they do alright,
Just shutting down for hours on end
Affording them the time to mend,
While not distracted by the random streams
That dreamers love to wend.
I know a girl who never dreams a wink,
She simply goes to sleep.
Her nights, she says, are always dark and quiet,
Hosting not a peep.
She’s heard, of course, about our world of maybe
And of brooding guilt,
But has never spent a single night within
The fantasies we’ve built.
I’ve heard there’s folk who sleep but never dream,
They wake like a minute has passed
A third of their life never seen, so sad,
But they can’t well miss what they never had.
Some say they do dream, but never recall
But how would they know they’re forgetting it all ?
Perhaps an echo remains inbetween,
A shadow of last night’s evenfall ?
I know a girl who feels no loss,
She’s done just fine with what she has,
With her endless deep and silent nights
Without the freeform jazz.
What matters, she says, is not what happens
In our nightly world of fake,
But rather what we do and who we are
While we’re awake.
Acid Verse
Lis’ning to psychelic music,
Joss stick sending up a stream,
Lava shadows on the ceiling,
Red wine drifting off to dream.
Don’t need drugs to taste the acid,
Just an over-yellow mind-
It’s gonna be one of those fitful nights
When the gears of my conscious grind.
Too much psychedelia,
It’s not from the drugs, this trance, though –
I swear, just wine, and a lack of coffee,
So why do the colours dance so ?
I guess that I must be dreaming ?
I really hope that I’m dreaming…
Cos if this is really psychotrope
Then I’m trapped inside a kaleidoscope.
I guess there are folks who deal with this ev’ry day –
Does it make me a bad person to say
That I never wanted to end up that way ?
Like this way. Like slipping down the slope.
Lis’ning to psychelic noodling,
Playing somewhere, distant, bleak –
It’s gonna be one of those endless nights
When the door of perception creak.
Too much recycled dioramaa,
But if not drugs, then what have I taken ?
If only I’d swallowed some bloody caffeine
Cos I need to reawaken.
So why am I still here dreaming ?
Or what am I not here dreaming ?
It’s not any pills from off the shelf,
But maybe my brain has brewed some itself ?
Maybe it’s cloning its own serotonin all day,
Or morphing endorphins to help it to play.
Or doped-up on dopamine, drooling away ?
Who’s to say ? Is it madness by stealth ?
Lis’ning to psychedelic mumbling,
Needle jumping, stuck on repeat –
It’s gonna be one of those Mobius nights
When Alice can’t find her feet.
Too much psyched-out sepia –
I don’t even own a secret stash,
But these uninvited thoughts wanna dance,
Now this party’s about to crash.
Can I still hope I’m nothing but dreaming ?
I gonna need help if I find I’m not dreaming
Cos I just don’t know how I’m gonna survive
If I’m right here awake and I’m streaming this live.
I don’t want to crash, but I don’t want to stay,
So help me to crash to an overcast day –
Cos there’s so many colours, I can’t find my way –
Help me, pray, when the DTs arrive.
Lis’ning to spaced-out psychic music,
Sometimes my mind is not my friend,
Cos psychedelic may sound angelic,
But it’s based on the blues in the end.
Insomnia
Until tonight, I always found that beds, any beds would set me free,
Ev’ry nudge and ev’ry sound could not breach my security –
But here I lie awake, so wide awake, so pointlessly unresting
Perhaps I ought to take a break,
Fill up the kettle –
No coffee, though, please !
A morsel maybe to help me settle,
Though lay off the cheese.
I always thought the night was full of creaks and banging pipes and stuff –
This house is eerily quiet when it speaks, not noisy enough !
The night and I both lie stock still,
Like the hush on the hill and the lull in the valley –
And yet, like me it also breathes…
But only one of us is keeping tally of the sleep the other thieves –
Adding up each stolen minute in my deficit of rest,
Ratchetting my stress as I know I’ll never get them back –
How long before I crack ?
Oh, to be falling into dreams,
To softly sink into its streams
To fall upon that netherworld where moonlight always beams.
But meanwhile…
The ticking of the alarm is not a friend,
Nor one I dare to silence –
Or how will I know when this Hell shall end ?
But the ticks just won’t shut up, even under the pillow
And then there’s the birds of dawn in the willow
That I always thought so pretty until this very morn.
And oh, here comes the headache –
So it’s back to the willow, it seems –
Though, hang on, does asp’rin keep you awake ?
Not that I’m exactly full of dreams right now,
Taking them on an empty stomach, too,
But anything to stop the throbbing in my brow.
Swallow them with the dregs of the wine –
Oh, it’ll be fine.
I’ll wash the glass since I’m here, as you do,
And spend a penny, I guess –
But if I’m getting up I might as well dress.
My thoughts spin round in my unsought leisure,
Till I’m sick of my company
And to think that sleep was once my pleasure –
How can it now be stumping me ?
I should be swimming through the deep of my mind,
Down and down, leave it all behind,
I used to find it all so easy,
One-two-three and off we go –
But tonight, there’s nobody home below.
Brain of Thought
How do we know
How we know what we know ?,
When we haven’t a clue
How we do what we do ?
And how do we think
When we think in a blink ?
In a faster-than-short,
We have caught us a thought.
They hustle and tout
And they wheedle and shout,
Like rumours and tracts
That have somehow crept out –
Till we realise there’s mountains of facts
That we swear we weren’t taught.
I do not know
How I know what I know,
But I know that they flow
As they come and they go.
Cos there’s stuff I’ve forgot –
Don’t know what, but a lot –
And there’s thoughts that will sow,
Lying low till they grow,
And they scatter and spread
Through my depths of my head
As factoids and fluff
That take root and embed.
Till I realise there’s jungles of stuff
That I happen to know.
The Luxury of Inconsequence
I set the world to right, alone at night –
The future’s glistening.
I sit and spout all day – but that’s okay,
Cos no-one’s listening.
I plot within my head, but have no dread –
They’ll surely stay there.
A thousand plans unborn, my greatness shorn
For ev’ry grey hair.
Yet all the while they’re checked, no lives are wrecked
Upon my schemings –
My legacy’s secure, when you ignore
My fervent dreamings.
Dream On
Sleeping is our right,
It is our patriotic duty –
And ev’ry dream is freedom,
And our freedom is to dream…
Sleep, my fellow patriots,
For sleeping is our beauty –
And dreaming is our industry
In which our twilights gleam.
Rhyming Couplets 