A new broadcast from Id Radio

Some months ago, in a warm, dry, almost windless Auckland that now seems like it must have existed in the middle of a distant continent, not on this dark and snowy island, I described, in what might charitably be called a prose poem, one of the long and peculiar dreams which are a side effect of the unglamorous drug called tramadol. In the comments thread under my post Keri Hulme recommended dark chocolate to those seeking especially vivid dreams, and Richard Taylor described his unpleasant encounter with tramadol.

Over the past week or so I've commandeered hot water bottles and cats as well as Skyler's half of the duvet in an attempt to sleep warmly. I've been sleeping for longer than normal, and I've noticed that I've been dreaming, night after night, about falling, often with the aid of a parachute or wings, and often out of a very cold sky towards a bright but not necessarily inviting earth. Am I right in guessing that the new recurrent dream is a sort of simulation of my cold and creaky body's collapse into the warmth of bed and the relief of sleep, or should I be getting out Jung and Freud and finding symbolic explanations for those silk chutes and Icarus feathers, not to mention the giant tortoise which seems, for no immediately obvious reason, always to be falling out of the sky beside me?

I wrote the following poem - in bed, of course - about the latest recurrent dream, and added an epigraph from Tomas Transtromer, who was voted the world's greatest living writer by readers of this blog back in 2006. Tomas is still alive, and I'm pleased to see that he's made the bookies' shortlist for this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. Tomas has written wonderfully about cold winter nights, but his fellow Swede Gunnar Ekelof probably has the spookiest poem on the subject. Ekelof's text thrilled and divided commenters here back in 2007, and it still makes my toenails curl up, especially when cold winds are blowing from Antarctica.

The Parachutist

'Waking up is a parachute jump from dreams'
- TT

amongst your squadron
a giant war tortoise
reliable
as a dud radio
its leather armour ripped off,
revealing red lines
circuitry
of the enemy city

for millennia
a moment
you are motionless
then you fall
out of heaven's
humming fuselage

the city's slabs
of darkness
rise
canal boats
barrage balloons
rickety pylons
rise

the chutes snap
open, puff like frogs
the squadron will land
in seventy-three seconds
the tortoise will be turned on its side
the tortoise will be mounted on poles
the tortoise will become
a battering ram

(the bombs came earlier
the bombs come later
the bombs are reduction
the bombs are perfection
the bombs fall
on Byzantium
on Goddodin
on Rekohu
on Rome

(Byzantium is reduced
to a single brick
Rome is reduced
to one wing
of its sewer
Goddodin reduced
to Aneurin's
nipped voice
Rekohu reduced
to a wash-through raft

in the cargo hold in the jumping bay
you were at war
on the ground you will be at war
but while you fall you are neutral
while you fall you are unnatural
like hailstones
like moonlight
like the swan that fires its afterburners
to escape this shrapnel

you close your eyes
you close your eyes to keep the cold
the rising city out
this is a dream you pray
this is a dream
this is a broadcast
from the Id
a secretion
of the pineal gland

you will land from the dream
in your childhood bed
you will wake to find horses
leaning over you
horses nibbling and nuzzling
the patterns on your quilt
patches of moonlight will lie
like saddles on their backs
you will have three minutes to clear
the landing area
before the first bombs fall