Sleep Watching

[TheFifthElement]

Sometimes it’s hard to tell where sleep ends
and waking begins. There is light;
it splits my hair from the white of the pillow.
My mind is a torn sheet, reality slips through the gap
catching on broken fibres that reach like little fingers
or dreams, half dreamt, detached from their endings.

There are creatures hiding here, if you wait
you will see them. A moth as big as a cat rests
on the wall, will it pounce or fly? Or the spider
dangling above my head, glowing red, a warning?
It shivers back to its web, shy under my scrutiny,
leaves one hairy crimson leg poking out as proof.

Shadows move across the room chasing the lines
on the ceiling. They are sand coloured, flat as paper
with more legs that I can count. Is it a trick of the light?
I close my eyes, blink, turn away. They remain
oblivious, they cannot see me. I watch them play,
dimly lit suns chasing each other like children.

I watch; I cannot feel my breath though it moves
the dust motes in and out, in and out. They swirl
in kaleidoscopic patterns, like a sand storm in the Sahara,
though I have never seen one but imagine it so.
I too am dust waiting to find my potential. Will I
dance one day, winking as the watcher watches?

In my dream there is a house with many doors,
and stairs that lead to rooms I’ve never seen before.
Strange, I didn’t expect to find you there
curled up on the rug before the fire. You smile
just like tomorrow, pass me a glass and your arm.
Is this reality? I neither know nor care.

[blp]

I'm just going to take out everything I don't like and leave the stuff I really really like. (it's pretty much that binary)



There is light;
it splits my hair from the white of the pillow.
My mind is a torn sheet, reality slips through the gap
catching on broken fibres that reach like little fingers
or dreams, half dreamt, detached from their endings.

There are creatures hiding here,
one hairy crimson leg poking out as proof.

Shadows move across the room chasing the lines
on the ceiling. They are sand coloured, flat as paper
with more legs that I can count.

dimly lit suns chasing each other like children.

Strange, I didn’t expect to find you there
curled up on the rug. You smile
just like tomorrow, pass me a glass and your arm.

[TheFifthElement]

Knowing your exacting standards blp, 50% isn't a bad start ;) Thanks for the feedback, as always it is very useful.

[PrinceMyshkin]

I disagree with blp, both on the general principle that poems should be reduced to their pith, and in practice with respect to this poem, where something of the somnambulistic essence of the experience is supported by some of the lines he proposes to omit, e.g.:


Sometimes it’s hard to tell where sleep ends
and waking begins.

Keats deplores poetry that makes too palpable a demand on us, and I used to warn my students to beware the tennis-serve opening (applicable especially to poems that begin with a rhetorical question) when, after the ball has been tossed into the air, we know that it is certain to get whacked. But this, I think, is guilty of neither of those. It has for me the modest quality of someone about to share something with a trusted friend...


if you wait
you will see them. A moth as big as a cat rests
on the wall, will it pounce or fly? Or the spider
dangling above my head, glowing red, a warning?
It shivers back to its web, shy under my scrutiny,
leaves

Proposing that The5th go directly to the hairy crimson leg deprives us of the inexorable way that dreams insist on laying out before us the detailed, seeming irrelevance of the experience - details that are relevant precisely because we cannot at once grasp their relevance. They will reveal it (or not) according to their own logic.


I too am dust waiting to find my potential. Will I
dance one day, winking as the watcher watches?

In my dream there is a house with many doors,
and stairs that lead to rooms I’ve never seen before.


There must be a country somewhere where you could be brought up on charges for proposing to excise these lines!

[shortstoryfan]

I really enjoyed this poem. Found a sense of another world in some lines, and good description of waking, and how our minds linger between awake and asleep.