A Strictly Private Viewing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

Today’s poem has not appeared on the blog since 2009. It first appeared in a Forward Press anthology, Poetry Rivals, 2009: Lyrical Winds and subsequently in my collection.

Now, dreams are often seen as an intrusion into our personal space, but personal space comprises conscious and unconscious thought. I see dreams as affording us a strictly private viewing of it, taking in all those parts that comprise the whole; reality, illusion, ego, home truths, denial, wishful thinking...etc. etc.

How we interpret dreams and may or may not let them influence us for better or worse...well, that's called choice.

A STRICTLY PRIVATE VIEWING

Cartoon faces moving across my sky

like a home movie;

I close tired eyes to push them away

but they haunt my mind;

happy faces, sad faces, tearful faces,

lips mouthing my name;

familiar, faintly familiar, some skeletal

expressions breaking out

Past, present, wishful thinking signals

to the brain to shut down

but they have logged on, not ready yet

to turn me off;

lies, half lies, bad errors of judgement

like some grotesque mob

up for rough justice for want of answers

I don’t have, never did;

monstrous accusations and insinuations

fall like bird droppings

on a statue’s public profile, frozen in time,

trapped in its own failings

I hear a distant cry, an echo of centuries

in pain, anger and grief

for all private lives and a personal space

relegated to speculation

new faces, clear signals, warning off

Conspirators to Nightmare,

put expressions of defeat to rout, deleted

like redundant icons on a screen;

benign spirits enough to grace a totem pole

take control, cast out

demons let slip past a kinder humanity

by an unforgiving hierarchy

Eyes open, eyes shut, sky relaying
to pillow the faces of love;

we sleep, we awaken to direct and star

in our own reality peep-show
for as long as it takes to log off from it all,
wondering if we might yet get
to carry on in a loved one's dream-poems
in remembrance of times past

Copyright R. N. Taber 2010

'[Note: An earlier version of this poem appears under the title 'A Penny to See the Peep-Show' in On the Battlefields of Love by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2010]