Dreaming mishaps

I should post something about the global economic crisis, which I've been discussing today in this mildly frustrating indymedia thread (keep scrolling down, and you'll find that the comments gradually get less idiotic), but instead I'm going to stick up two recent instalments in my on-again, off-again dream logbook; in my defence, I might say that both the dreams I've recorded seem to allude obscurely to the ongoing economic turmoil.

There are a number of dream-poems in my 2007 book, To the Moon in Seven Easy Steps, which you can now order online.


Matariki (23/08/08)

Tonight Pleiades is a squadron of burning bombers flying over Auckland, as the Manukau overfills and leaks into silted estuaries, and a Bedford van blows a tyre and spins to a halt, making a barricade on the southern motorway, near the turnoff where the old portage went through hip-deep mud,

tonight Pleiades is seven fighter-bombers smudged by smoke, pursued by radar and a wind off the Tasman, moving in a slow arc, moving high enough to disguise the slowing drone of their second engines, to mute the explosions in storage rooms and reserve fuel tanks,

tonight Pleiades is a flock of burning B 52s, flying over Auckland in an unsteady arc, flying on autopilot, now that the crews have parachuted, flying more brightly with each explosion,

flying and burning and waiting to fall


The Building Site (12/10/08)

I closed the door, kicked the last cans into a corner, pissed in a pot plant, groped the armchair for smokes, and rolled into an unmade bed.

I woke up in starlight, with my duvet soaked in dew. A man with a glowing torso pushed a peg into the clay at the edge of my bed, then turned, and took fifteen slow paces, like a fast bowler measuring his run, then turned again and nodded at his mate, who was kneeling between my armchair and my dresser, planting the theodolite like a conquerer's flag.