Poems for Peculiar Children

I Wept to Wake

I dreamt
of a menagerie of chambers in villages
of ballooning rooms and curling ferns,
of stained glass tiles and gingerbread panes.
I wandered through apartments    
of fabric, low ceilings, feathered poufs, pillows to comfort the discomfited;   
of shaking boards, fall-through-into-alligator-pit boards, nails-through-foot boards, Lara-Croft-Tomb-Raider-boards;   
of sea creatures and kelp faces, scaly slitherers moving through bookshelves and dust;   
of seventy-two bathrooms, powder rooms, sneak-glances-in-mirror rooms;   
of fur-coat-filled closets nine miles long where I brushed bare skin with paramours and met gazes filled with shibboleths--Open Sesame! hush--be back at this place at an inopportune opportunity . . . everything you wait for awaits;   
of tiny doors looking out on impossible rose gardens, watered by salt-tear pools and stolen tarts;   
of smoking rooms stuffed with blooming eyes and unpreparedness, glittering mosaics;   
of mawkish violins and morose memories, waning beside a coffin all set for a wake, the form inside it familiar, the single mourner requested ever absent;
of a playground of mathematically preposterous slides of curling, looping, projecting-into-space plastic, where inner children are eaten by laughter;  
of flight a million times, ten thousand ways--run, leap, hover: take air! they are all agape;   
of electricity with your proximity;
of a room for two, tigers in the corners, an illusion contingent on nine lives.   
of joy ordained simply--here, unduly, amply--
And I wept to wake.