Notes on a Dream
skin sheens sweat / thru dark a man stares at me
& why this fear / manifests itself as fixation
I don’t mean I’m afraid I mean it hurts every time
///
last night I was a cowboy / pursued by sheriff ghosts
at the campfire / the dead bastards shot me / a fugitive feeling
not unlike being hunted / haunted / don’t look behind you
///
falling asleep to Lorde’s “Buzzcut Season” / ode to the waking dream
I confuse the lyric / I live in a hologram with you / for hallowed ground
cannot unhear this / make believe it’s hyperreal / wildsmoke off the fence
night elides us / slick, cold & breath-close
chorus of the lost / a mistaken intimacy
a mondegreen / a green world
for so long this hard press of knife. / slice
my calloused fingertips / & out sprouts a phantom
touch / ghostpoppies / invocation of softness /
///
some nights they come to me as zombies. or not zombies but
undead / not ghosts (immaterial) or reanimated (fleshrot) but as
a kind of undoing / alternate spring / in which the dead never die
///
late summer afternoon I awake with a start / sweat-choked
& burning / taste of pink bubblegum seared in the mouth
how to carry over / sweetsmell / make real all that is not
blue of the ante-sun / out of the damp, black
gravel / the platypus-penguins begin to hatch
one tips its vermillion bill in my palm
tapping in recognition / hunger / I run away.
it’s screaming & I’m not its mother
what do I care.
///
in the dream the ghost refuses to leave my body / says
she holds me back bc I will not reckon with the truth
great. how the disease is exactly the symptom
in “Revolutionary Letter #41,” Diane di Prima describes
revolution as turning, as the earth / turns, among planets,
as the sun / turns round some (darker) star
we turn / from dark to light, turn
faces of pain & fear, the dawn
awash among them
///
disremember all the tonguesick paradigms / paradise
a walled lotus-garden / utopia / which means nothing
of heaven / its root of sky / ceiling / boundary / limit
///
unswallow the misery that soothes
says / escape is only a dream.
no dream will escape us
dream up for our loves / dead & new / new freedoms
devotions / dance / songs / aches / words / to shout
each we are wood-ash, bile & moonrust to give
///
the cicada-nymphs / crawl out of their dreams
into my mouth / perch on my tongue / turn
towards the unfamiliar firmament / sing counterpoint
///
I come to / dreamsong
to sunrise / to remake our hands
a murmuration / wavering. or waving
Sebastian Barros (he/they) is a queer Filipino editor and poet. Their work has been featured in The Daily Cal and HOLD: A Journal.