The Somnolent Territories

Inspired by recent poetry readings, I've started working on some new verses for the first time in years, and in the process went back through some older unpublished works to find and edit this piece, which is essentially a catalog of places I visit in my sleep. Enjoy!


The Somnolent Territories

roving insomniac landscapes
cities hung off the cliffs of mind’s eye
no windows and a blurry clock
peeling the hours between dim alleys
crooked wooden dovecote homes
and the diagonal drift of vague
symbol-choked bars and opera halls
rocknroll dripping from the walls of

haunted hallucinating forests
footsteps cobwebbed off a too-close moon
searching for that one winged book
and a lock to lost love’s keystone
crumpled across the dunes and obelisks
of memory’s striated bedrock
vast with sand in the hourglass eye
and only one light on in the ruins
where they mine for replicating relics
to prove the world was ever here
but only in the lone of night when

the desert of soul ripples with worms
worm holes and the witch’s grotto
she’ll sell you charms and insurance
against early morning amnesia
and the mountains of shivering ice
carved to statues of flayed godsflesh
down the porcelain-leaved road of trials
all highways pass the convex lake
to the city of crystal and conveyors
floating on the edge of that abyss
where they fight off tooth decay
and visions of apocalypse by fire
and you don’t want to know
what lurks in the subbasement

but down to the beach
which we still can never reach
straddling tall mossy barrier reefs
beyond pirated jungle villas
to watch the spume of whalebacks
and the underwater sun slope
out of this rose colored sea of dreams
while the lighthouse keeps blinking
on the shelf of my father’s study
calling out to some greater tower
lying leagues offshore maybe north or

in an Oakland you can’t reach either
and or the walls are all façades and or
labyrinthine with jeebering horrors
you shouldn’t have asked about
and just like every childhood nightmare
it’s hiding around the corners
and or those walls are actually
a hostile alien life form maybe
a dark chaotic maelstrom that will
transport you to another dimension
like endless stairwells or the gates of hell
you can’t seem to stay away from
those worm holes rippling
and somewhere in the middle where
spiders spin the worlds together
is maybe a good night’s sleep.