In the wood’s heart
There is light
And there is dark.
The poet finds
Delight
With woodland
Nymphs.
For girls
Of the mind
Are never bland.
The Poet’s Mind
4 Replies
Tag Archives: imagination
I Take You At Night
I take you at night
In dreams,
But it is not quite right,
And all is not as it seems
Too Much Reading
Too much reading
My imagination feeding.
It’s a little after 1 am
When
I hear you hoot,
The night’s flute
So cold and so clear
Instilling a dull fear.
Somewhere a TV or radio burbles on,
Then owl and noise are gone.
I drink in the silence
Then sleep sets me free.
But no
It is not so
For I dream
A dream in early December,
Of what
I don’t remember,
For the individual man
And his dreams are soon forgot.
Dreams
There are dreams, streams
Of consciousness of which I shall not speak,
For I am weak
And would not have you know
Where I go
In sleep,
Lest you weep
For my dark heart.
I shall not tell you of my nightmares
For you have cares
Of your own
And, when alone
I would not have thee see
What tortures me.
I shall not open my heart
For you have dark
Thoughts enough of your own.
So let us leave our demons alone
Until they creep
Out in sleep
And we, in earnest weep.
A Long Way Back
The barefoot girl who never was
Because
The beach
Remained out of reach
To me.
I hear the sea
And feel the sand
But I can not command
Your hand into mine,
For I find
That you are a mermaid of my mind,
Or perhaps half real,
Though one can not a kiss seal
With a middle-aged man’s hazy recollection
Of a perfection of skin
And imagined sin.
Shortcut
I remember the cut-through,
People drew
Graffiti on the fence,
Perhaps deriving a sense
Of power from their obscene scrawls
On wooden walls.
The Sex Pistols featured there, and perhaps the name of some hapless girl
Was inscribed
In lust and pride.
How the years whirl
By.
Now I can not spy
The narrow place
Where I would trace
Nature’s face
In nettle and bramble
As I did scramble
Through the thicket of my mind.
Now I can not find
the old track
That leads back
To whence I came.
A barred gate
Patiently does wait
And beyond it, my fate?
As insubstancial as a dream
“How do you know that you are here” my friend Jeff asked as we sat in our favourite local Indian restaurant. “I don’t. I’ve experienced vivid dreams during which I’ve believed myself to be awake” I replied. My friend responded that there was no answer to that!
The above exchange got me thinking about what constitutes reality. If I believe an event to be truly happening that occurance takes on concrete form as for a moment, however brief I experience the firings of my dreaming brain to be the occurance of an event in real time. Consequently one may argue that dreams are real while we are caught up in our dreaming but what if we never wake? What about the person in a coma who spends months (sometimes years) dreaming? Are their dreams real? My tentative answer to that question is that one’s dreams are real while one is dreaming them.
One may object that once one awakes the dreamer knows the difference between the dream-like state and the experience of wakefulness but what of the person who believes themselves to have awoken but who has, in point of fact moved from one sequence of dreaming to another?
Ultimately we must all work on the basis that we are experiencing actual events rather than dreams. If We do not proceed on this basis then the world would fall apart. I, for example need to shower, have breakfast and leave for the office in the next hour or so, that is the reality of my current situation. Or is it? Perhaps I am dreaming and rather than it being Wednesday morning it is, in fact the weekend and I will awake in a few hours to find myself with Saturday and Sunday to enjoy away from the office or maybe not!
Feeling Bereft
I feel bereft. Since December 2012 I’ve been working on my story, Samantha and yesterday (20 February) I completed the manuscript. For several months Samantha and the other people in my book have been my more or less constant companions. While walking to the station to take the train into work my mind has been busy thinking about the storyline and rehearsing dialogues. Suddenly all that is over, ends have been tied up and the story put to bed.
Since December the actors in Samantha have become real to me, they have lived in my brain and become part of my life. At a fundamental level I know that the persons in Samantha are mere figments of my imagination, however to write convincingly one must believe in the people you create, they do at some level take on a life of their own. When Sam is abused by her brutal pimp it is a mere will of the wisp, a nothing which suffers. Sam does however represent those who are forced into the sex industry against their will and, as such she is real. Her pain represents the suffering of actual sex workers who have been compelled to become prostitutes so, at another level Sam does, most definitely exist.
I said at the start of this post that Samantha has been completed. This is not quite correct. While Samantha exists in draft form on my blog (http://newauthoronline.com/2013/02/20/samantha-part-16/), It is my intention to edit the book with the view to publishing my manuscript as an ebook. During this process changes will be made although the fundamentals of the story will remain the same.
K Morris - Poet 