Tao, a Dreamed Poem
The French are fornicating underground –
that explains the steam and red smoke,
the urgent throats and mouths agape.
Aboveground, the English grow rows
of swollen flowers, shoulder-to-shoulder,
fulsome as Christmas Pie.
Fire, air, earth, and water,
swirl inside what we think we see,
unframed by our snapshot lies,
unclaimed by our flags of hallucination.
Richards, a Lazy Susan of Dreamed Poem
I have baby-face panache
as a freshman on the international debate team.
At the university bookstore
I buy two giant Russian sunflowers for my dorm.
I enter and leave the bookstore
over and over, furrowing my compulsive tic.
#
I promote homegrown debate:
zip-tie your loved one to a chair and interrogate.
The standing inquisitor leans
into the personal space of the seated interrogee.
A light from a bare kitchen bulb
will silhouette the silence of your shouting.
#
My two Richards will be
my star performers when we go on the road.
One’s a drama queen.
He says heartworms could very well kill him.
The other one’s a good old boy.
He says 100% he’s going to get well.
#
I hook up with a nun at a bar.
She’s shriveled by age but swells with authority.
She lays her hand on my wrist:
Just take your medicine and drink plenty of water.
Space around my head expands.
I’m just one more mote in a cosmic dust storm.
Possum Breath, a Triptych of Dreamed Poems
A possum’s loose in the house,
dashing through every door as it opens,
running room to room, uncatchable,
trailing mirror images that are her babies.
Clint Eastwood is the father.
That’s why he played Wimbledon this year.
He needs the prize money to cover child support.
I am every character in this dream.
#
Sex is a pole vault Annie tells me,
not with her voice box
but through the rhythm of her stride
after she sails over me and saunters out the door.
I watch her through a window.
She’s spry, young, not bent, crippled,
not wheel-chairing in the nursing home.
Did she recover, or was she playing possum?
Now has many shapes, she says.
Now is a stretchy rope.
#
We’re high school merchants, David and me.
in a store that sells long-handled tools.
David says: Borrow your dad’s car
so we can watch the game at Jeff’s house.
But I won’t waste time watching games.
I’m going to become St. Francis of Assisi.
David’s possum jaw squares in anger.
I explain I’m speaking from the future.
Mike Wilson’s work has appeared in magazines including The Gravity of the Thing, Mud Season Review, The Pettigru Review, Still: The Journal, and in Mike’s book, Arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic. Mike’s awards include the League of Minnesota Poets Award, the Maine Poets Society Award, and the Chaffin/Kash Prize of the Kentucky State Poetry Society. He lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
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