Flying

He flew across the room and the knick-knacks
looked like angry men and women in a landscape,
the furniture like unforgiving mesas and canyons.
It was a dream but not his: he was the detritus
in someone else’s sleep, and soon to lose his human shape.
Could we still call him the same? A dream forgets itself
and everyone you’ve loved is a chemical reaction.
My entire life is sparks and outright explosions;
but the sparks only tingle, and the explosions
never once wake me from this marvelous dream.

*

Chagallesque, perhaps -- in its opening; or just standard allegory. Confession, elegy, epitaph -- more and more, my way of inventing a poem is by thinking rhetorically (or by imitating; but that too, is a rhetorical device).

Also, often, the workspace is a matrix: an idealized room or field (and out here, I have my field just out the door! I've used it as a matrix for many poems over the last two years. Amazing what a difference it makes, having "nature" larger than a yard at your beck).

The room...some idealized space, in which the walls are white space for innumerable poems; and the furniture and such, props, characters, dramatic situations...

but I should open out to different interior spaces as crucibles: atria, cathedrals, long hallways, submarines...what else has promise for lyric discovery?