I dream of you -
My skull all draped in leather and
Badly lit,
And your hands punch
The tusk of my cranium
To get me started.

I dream of you
Skulking around a videogame,
Stealing trolleys.

I dream of you,
Talking in a language
That doesn’t translate,
You’re laughing at something I’ve said,
And I’m laughing back,
Because I don't understand
That I don’t
Understand you.

I dream of you cooking a fry up and
saving me from
Spiders,
I dream of you
In all butterfly colours,
Stuck at one age,
Face changing,
Pixels smattering,
Digestive biscuit hair
Crumbling in the wake of
waking.

I dream of you playing dice in the corner,
Or running from bombs.
I dream that you are bigger than me,
Far bigger than you
Really are.

I dream of you,
Wet dreams of you,
******* me from behind
Like a gold shadow that I can’t touch,

And when I wake up,
I feel like I've done everything with you.

(I dream of my sister,
My father,
And you.
I dream of the healthiest people that I know.)

So.
What kind of sleep
Do you want?

The lacy white kind
Where you remember
All of your dreams,
Like glimpsing gardens
Behind cobwebs?
The kind of sleep that
slips on air,
running out of oxygen
like a drowner,
a sleep where
you recall
the hour you
closed your eyes?

Or do you want a
Sledgehammer?
A total blackout,
A sudden death,
Oblivious to fires
And burglaries
And nightmares?
Asleep so fast you
Can barely make out
Legs,
A marathon of hours
Done.

****** or Ambien?
C’mon,
Choose and hush up,
Morning’s waiting.

A million bitten off breaths
Hang quietly.
I’m close enough to hear
her thudding -
A jarring noise that parts
a cloud of frothy swans.

We’ve all seen photographs
in Wildlife Books –
I’m sure you can conjure up
the moment a water bird
lances a sunlit river
with the very tip of its beak
to gobble a fish.
It’s a difficult photo to take,
It’s all over so quickly -
The fish caught,
The river moving, moving,
Still.
But here she is in front of me,
That bird,
Suspended with one
Foot in this world,
And the other
In another.

Her toes grind up the
Spotlight,
Trampling into
the moon and balancing there,
(I'm surprised the stage
is not full of chalk.)
It's not beautiful,
Not ghostly,
But all visceral meat glistening,
Fitness, strength, survival,
Like nature…

No need to take a photo,
She is a picture that my mind has
Tricked me into taking.

So perhaps that’s talent, darling..?

Or
Perhaps it’s something else, with a name I never knew.