Moviola

The movie runs late at night,
in those hours after you have fallen asleep
but long before it is decent to wake.
You lie in bed and it plays
a montage outside your control,
some nights wild with romance,
bright and garish,
tender and musical
where the notes soar
until that moment they fall from grace
and the curtains call. ,

other nights the movie runs in black and white,
a newsreel,
wretched with battles lost,
the ruins reminding you
that you too are the victim of wars lost,
a survivor of you folly and the folly of others
deaf with the voices inside their own heads
drowning out the whistle of the bombs falling
like deadly angels.

Still other nights,
it is a macabre Midsomer’s Night Dream,
Madcap. Insane. Beautiful.
A costume drama where all is exposed
and all is hidden,
where light and dark dance playfully
like a teasing lover at the ball.

You rest your head on the pillow,
unsure what the moviola will bring you
this night, sure only that you will wake
in the morning,
changed, unsure, for just that brief moment
which is dream,
and which is real.

About this poem

I dream vividly. Almost too vividly.

Tom