Dreams

We are the only animals I know where food, water and air will never be enough for an existence that is meaningful and who have therefore learned to feed off their imagination and their dreams. 

Ian McCallum

 I climbed out of my own mouth

Down a mahogany staircase of quivering chin

To release the catch in my throat

So that courage can be coughed up

On to the silver plate of reality

To be served, as a sacrifice, back to Morpheus

With gleaming cutlery sharpened on old almosts 

What a feast it could be 

A regurgitation of recurrence that refuses to repent its realness

The resolve being a resurrection that removed its own rock from the mouth of the cave

Only to have my chest cave in under crosses of dreams deferred

With a pole, I raise in the sun, a bivouac tent of heart and ribs of the collapse

Caged, within and without, out of reach and yet too close to home

"Dreams, that's all there is."  

I can almost taste them in the air

A salty fragrance from the belch of whales which swallow dreams whole

Yes Msaki, I am at home in the land of the brave

In this ritually armoured body that rests and rises and rises again, facing east without being sunk

"Dreams, that's all there is."

Wilderness by Ian McCallum

Have we forgotten

that wilderness is not a place,

but a pattern of soul

where every tree, every bird and beast

is a soul maker? 

Have we forgotten

that wilderness is not a place

but a moving feast of stars,

footprints, scales and beginnings? 

Since when

did we become afraid of the night

and that only the bright stars count? 

Or that our moon is not a moon

unless it is full? 

By whose command

were the animals

through groping fingers,

one for each hand,

reduced to the big and little five? 

Have we forgotten

that every creature is within us

carried by tides

of Earthly blood

and that we named them?

Have we forgotten

that wilderness is not a place,

but a season

and that we are in its

final hour?