unless

if you fall asleep here
the jets will become birds and
a frightening dream will appear
in a voice to say
Supple me out Supple me
leaking from the walls and ceilings
like crickets under siege

I think The Best Thing will stumble
up from under your dreaming
call it a flower or rain falling
so perfectly down that ants can
literally walk between the drops
as we might weave a path through trees

so voices in the hall remind us
that we are inside kept in a cool room
where paper breathes and teacher calls us
funny names we will never recognize as
our own in fact we cannot hear

them at all we think that nothing
is happening inside the dream
so we step out into wakefulness
to find breath absent

in the busy day where each step takes us
farther into the mystery of stone so
heavy dark dense and anonymous

that we fall toward each other
as rock to pond or pilot to plane

for this certain magnetic appointment

this madness expansive as old laundry
compressed in hampers or lost for months

abandoned yet suddenly apparent
in our dingy apartments drizzling
daylight past empty mirrors

sloppy poetry no one reads except
in dreams and only then to
complain about the missing songs
wild and well-muscled as sun

how the dream calls you up
from an imperfect day to your next
bright home but you have
something to do before
your simple mystery heads south

call it luck or a good education
but the guests have disappeared to
become insects on another continent
nothing like africa or asia and
the ceiling drops a shawl of tears
around your perfect shoulders and

every memory in your tiny body
calls you toward this window of sudden
stillness call it a natural thing
call it a black stone understanding that
the air is a constant freedom while
you have it and you have it
surely while you sleep here