Dreams

Let me sleep, for in my dreams

I am one with you.

Wake me up, and what was one

sadly again becomes two.

I was never good as half a person,

but I never knew my other half

before I knew you.

The nut to my screw.

If I don’t make sense it is

because you make me delirious.

I blame you.

For mad racing thoughts

and these arousals, too.

I adore and love you

as madly as a mouse loves cheese,

fating the trap for a single morsel,

through this mysterious life that promises nothing

but what we give and take

until the final trip and snap of fate.

That other sleep that I don’t yet know,

and neither do you, I suppose.

I can’t imagine, even there,

I’d be without you.

Dreams go on, I’m sure they do.

These kind of dreams have to.

This kind of love, I never knew.

Life is give and take.

And if I had only to take only one thing,

like that mouse would his cheese,

I’d take you,

my beautifully-aged limburger cheese,

from any steely-jawed trap.

And to give, I’d give you all my love

and my life freely,

with no concern over my soon-to-be broken neck, or my body.

I’d go through lab experimentation.

Perfume in my eyes,

dyes on my skin,

insecticide and poisons.

Those I’d happily product test

and ingest for you

like the rats at happy hour in the dumpsters do.

Yes. I will. And I do.

Already before any proposal

or any question has even been asked.

I cannot yet make a vow so permanent than this,

but save for a ring,

my vow is no less consecrated

with every kiss that is never,

ever given lightly, or begrudgingly.

And I hope my kiss is no less

than the first to you,

and that the last is far off and not near to us as gray hair or bad hips.

May the last be as our ashes

are picked up by a whirlwind

when a romantic sympathetic grandkid

yet to be pours us out of two urns

into the water of Ft. Lauderdale,

and maybe then food for those ribbon fish that swam once between our legs,

where you peed and I refused.

Or was I confused?

Old age strips the screws.

Or we’ll slowly drift to a distant deserted island

and be the only two with our mineral fragment toes

scattered in the white sand like crabs.

Maybe our ashes will rejoin and clump together

and we will become something like the primordial batter

of distant relatives that formed, I feel,

simply for us to one day be together.

Or spiritually in the cloud,

in another universe yet known

but prophesied on Sundays at Church

where you stood with the light through stained-glass windows dancing in your eyes

until we got too old to stand for the songs.

There are no lab mice up there,

no Limburger cheese. No traps.

There is only love. No steel snap.

No endings. No pills or canes.

No bad hips or graying of anything.

It is all pink, fresh, and taut. Brand new.

It is that way to me.

You were and will always be that way to me.

I could go on and gush and goo,

but it’s better to be mysterious

and to hold it within, until you do, someday, too.

Until you dream of these places and things materialize,

where oysters walk the sea floor

carrying old wedding rings like Aztec sacrifices.

And where the walrus sings

the anthem of our eternal honeymoon.

I dream of you in abstract

because you’re too brilliant a dream to be dreamed any other way.

You deserve all the words and metaphors.

They were all made for you,

even if I’m not the one to give them to you.

But in sleep, in dreams, I do.