What dreams have come...

We give our kids Lego Headaches
And Intol Inhalers to bind their legs
And keep them shackled to science.
And they’re afraid, all their lives,
Flinching at the words “tonsil” and “penicillin”.
Surgery’s not such a bad thing.
Some of my best epiphanies
Have come to me while under the knife.

It’s the way a drowned man sits up and spits out water,
And either never ventures near the water again
Or is, from then on, fearless in the face of the waves.
I don’t suppose it really matters,
Except that I feel like the drowned man.
And even in anesthetized dreams,
The thoughts are clearer in the saline current,
And the sights sharper through lidded eyes:

I’m swallowing in the dark,
Still tasting irontang in the back of my throat.
It’s a good thing Time doesn’t exist here,
Because it would have stopped for me.

Sleeping again, traveling that bottomless chasm
That is the lifeline of my dreams,
Like a highway to horror.
Take a spine-crushing dive
Toward an impact that will never come.

Gasp, start, reaching for a pen,
To spill blue ink confessions
In crooked lines
To ease my conscience.
Nervous fingers fall on pistols,
Not inkpens,
With hairpin triggers,
Magazines locked and I think it’s cocked,
Before I know
Facedown on the green concrete,
And that seems strange,
But my eyes are sliding closed, and it doesn’t matter
I’m resting at last.