Last Dream of the Night

A dream so real it has edges that cut.
Sins and betrayals come to haunt you.
Love gone dark, threatening to burst
like color in Pleasantville.
Beautiful and dangerous
Asbury Park at its lowest ebb,
decrepit, dark, a winter dream.
A picture from the thirties come alive
with feelings and a sad soundtrack, zither music,
almost off-key. The whole dream
a little off-kilter, Hitchcock-like.
But not with dread, no, all of it
Feeling all too normal.
Not a face to be seen. Body parts.
A man’s waist. A woman’s feet.
That spot on the neck to the back of an ear.
In the distance, someone singing Ave Maria
out of time with the zither. Another laughs
and the laugh echoes.
One moment it is night. The next it is day.
Your eyes never adjust.

About this poem.

Mostly an attempt to shake the last dream from last night out of my head. Sometimes the worst things in our lives lose their power when we speak them.

Most of the references are probably familiar, but maybe not Pleasantville. Here’s the one-line description (with annotation by me) from the IMDb: “Two 1990s teenage siblings find themselves in a 1950s sitcom, where their influence begins to profoundly change that complacent world.” As that change happens. The black and white movie begins to slip into color. Passion does that. It is a movie worth seeing.

The picture was taken in Asbury Park.

Have a great weekend!

Tom