After a battery of tests,
observed in my bed for nights
sleeping in a net of electrodes,
the doctor told me my problem
was that I didn’t dream enough.
He suggested several unconventional
remedies to inform my brain to enter
it’s dream state as soon as possible.
Keep a CD designed to induce delta waves
playing on a soft volume all night.
Have a 20 minute routine where you relax and
prepare for bed, leaving everything else behind.
Choose a book you won’t stop reading till you
fall asleep under the covers by flashlight.
Move into a house with tall high ceilings and
replace all your furniture with pieces too large
for you to fit into.
Tap out the rhythm of robin songs and
determine what they were saying
if they spoke in morse code.
Read the letters of ex-lovers by the light of fireflies.
Designate Spider-Man as your totem animal.
Create an ice cream flavor named
“bittersweet shark-bite” and eat it
a half-hour before bedtime.
Play a 2-man game of solitaire.
Your opponent: entropy.
Try to lick your own elbow. Failing that,
try to lick someone else’s
while on the bus. The trick to this is
to keep all your teeth.
Shake hands with all ghosts you meet.
Be courteous and look them in the eye.
Practice writing resumes in the service
of downsized guardian angles.
List the best locations (carnivals, preschools)
for zombie infestations.
When in a holding pattern above an abandoned city,
don’t radio the tower, just skydive down and let the
plane crash into the tarmac. It’s just carrying baggage anyway.
Run to the known world’s edge, then plunge.
Return with a map of the new world.
Stop cleaning your chrysalis.
It’s time to become something.
You will know this works when your
third-eye enters REM sleep and
quakes open beauty like windmills
made from monster wings,
snaps apart your heart like a sudden wake,
breaking white-foamed waves,
spraying everywhere particles
that immateriate your stone-laden grave.
Do you understand what I’m saying?
I tell him, not at all.
He tells me – listen – because the enemy clocks
are set to obliterate this message and as a
secret agent of the ecstatic agenda I have to
do what I can before the devastation engines
erase these lessons from memory and
as he spoke the ceiling broke open and
the anxiously anticipated weather,
with highs in the 60s, made an appearance,
with tonight’s lows in the low 50s. It’s the top
of the hour. And we’ll now return to the music –
— was how the clock-radio sabotaged it all –
And I, crust-eyed, blurry-minded, was dumped awake
into the pre-workday darkness.