NOT A BUTTERFLY DREAMING

Am I a butterfly dreaming, or a man who dreamed he was a butterfly?
Chuang-Tzu

Not a butterfly dreaming for I have only a whimsy of flight,
and if I were to alight on a blossom the pollen would make me sneeze.
Besides, I've seen my true dreamer,
not as a vast vision among the clouds
but as a smudge on my bathroom wall.
He snores, needs a shave and clean underwear.
I even hear his stomach gurgle,
which explains my constant gas.
I can't poke him awake, though sometimes I want to,
for I have no substance in his world.
I wish he'd have another wet dream.

Is he God?
If I'm his dream how can he be God?
Furthermore, if he were God
he'd have to dream all of you up also,
and not even Satan deserves such punishment.
No, I'm his dream alone.

Each of us is a creation of his own personal dreamer.
The insane among us walking city streets
scream to wake up their respective dreamers.
The so called sane hear only the unanswered echoes.
I'm among the mad but I keep quiet.
Last night I glimpsed my dreamer on his dirty SRO cot.
He was the smudge reflected in the mirror behind my reflection.
He was smiling, almost laughing in his sleep.

He always dreams of comedy, and that's my nightmare.

 

AN APPROPRIATE HELL

Never made much sense to me
whips, pitchforks, brimstone, the whole rigmarole.
A leader should reward his minions
if only to keep his followers loyal.
Give them gluttonous feasts and proper orgies,
exalt the best on sulphurous thrones,
pin goat horn medals on the most loyal.
This eternal burning stuff is not a good incentive.

Perhaps old red-body is just a clerk,
a middle manager with a sharp point up his rear,
a slavish toady who just follows orders,
in a place where everyone follows orders.
But orders from where? From above of course.
The smoking pit is merely a subsidiary
of a holding company conglomerate with assets sky-high.
Hell isn't run by the mightiest foe of God and man,
but by a grade five civil servant, with seniority.

The wages of sin couldn't be death,
for both the good and evil receive the same payment;
that's communism, God forbid.
No, Satan's employees would find upon their termination of service
a cruel deception about their retirement benefits.
First an easy walk downstairs instead of up,
so far so good, but then
at the bottom they would find
a processing center.
An eternity of application and claim forms to fill out,
while they stand in a long line,
so very huge they can't notice it's circular,
waiting for the horned curmudgeon
to finish his lunch break.

 

THE NIHILIST CREATIONIST POEM

This universe is colored writer's block white,
not bridal, virginal white, but filler white,
an annoying glare that just takes up space.
Genesis has it framed like a photo negative.
This universe was not born from darkness.
That first decree was,
"Let there be dark, and let the inky blackness dot the white."
For the Supreme Author,
the would be writer of the first sentence,
had thought of nothing original after an eternity of pondering.
All was blank, an absolute blank.
What made matters worse was the realization
that if He had come up with anything at all
it would have been, by definition, original.
Panic gripped Him,
for if nothing came out, could there be nothing inside?
He needed something, anything, on paper.
Thus He decreed a cosmic dappling
of dark characters on the blinding white void.
Now look around you, characters of his creation,
does His plot make any sense?
No, we're all the fruit of a grand doodle
across an infinite celestial page.
This universe is His first effort, a promising but still sophomoric try.
Our common prayer should be
an end to artistic inspiration,
a writer's block of infinite duration,
for if inspired our Author
would crumple up this embarrassing doggerel and pitch it.
Then he'd put a new sheet
in His metaphorical typewriter which
would pound out a much better script,
preferably on paper colored an eye-soothing light blue.

© Richard Fein 2002