Passport

So many different bad things were happening at once.

I closed my eyes and remembered I was dreaming.

 

Dream can mean what one longs for

or that which is fantastic, unreal.

 

On TV, the investment firm ad says

there are three hundred and thirty million dreams,

 

all American and therefore all special.

To help me achieve mine they need

 

only one thing: my money. All our dreams seem

like the same dream, the dream of more.

 

When I wake I am at the border of a far country.

When I wake it is to watch the branches

 

of the sycamore sway, the hands

of the clock slide and fade away.

 

In the best dreams even memory

becomes possibility, becomes ambient, bright.

 

Summer flywheel in the sunned garden.

All we had, long ago, coalescing.

 

I want what you want, of course I do.

I want us all to stop believing we have

 

not arrived and never will.

Define ambition. Define waste. I dreamed

 

that in my last dream I laid my words down

like a hedge I could sleep soundly under.

 

In the universal game of hide and seek

we were the hardest to find, we were unstoppable.

 

Then the rules changed.

We counted the days.

 

Even language acquired a bitter taste.

Define happy. Define together. Define wonder.


Also by Tim DeJong