Dreamed Letters

“You write long articles

                                         between your paragraphs”

She said across the ouija

                                 Vesta         Smash       Formica table

She, with the coloured felt pens

a finger-staining cluster

a Gatling lustre

And letters adorned

with hearts, rainbows,

and shooting stars

…literary, spiritual

current affairs notes and

party invites that read in spirals -

the grist of student life and thought

Mine were more monochrome meanderings

yet florid and verbose

a celebratory outpouring

a textual cascade

Remembered through waking paralysis

just a thing I went through

weird - was I on the astral plane,

(or was I in my crumbling

‘gasfire blues’ bedsit)

But I mean

what would you tell a doctor anyway

without they accused you

of flavoured inhalations

or dusty sniffs?

Great logic would unfold

to test my memory

and I didn’t mind

that I struggled to move - and write

I called it ‘re-realisation’

as if I was remembering

lessons of

what, a past life - or just parental warnings?

Or was it just mindfulness

connecting with presence of mind…

A making sense, when your world

is some kind of dream

- which everyone got

And Jane drew dogs - square, rectangular,

with dots for whiskers

We would be clinker-deep in flurries

of conceptual fatuation

Swimming in ectoplasmic streams

of abstract echoes

Felt not seen,

our young minds

probing alien concepts

Uncomfortable with god

curious about the old ways

certain we were on the cusp

of some supermorphic

omnipotent metamorphosis

Imagining how things were

imagining how people are

Then dealing with the reality

as if some lesson had ended.

I miss those dreamy letters

how I miss those dreamy letters

Then I realised I was

TRAPPED

in my own poem

And still I wonder - 

do the dead know what we’re thinking?