Geoff Stevens
Backlighting the aquarium of your dreams
In your guppy sleep,
the bubbles of the pump in your brain,
its rubber taste in the tubes of your blood,
the images of veined eyelids
in your flustered, fluttering dreams,
a butterfly pouncing on a sea-cabbage,
the crumpled, complementary-colour sheet of crimson lake
tacking its equilateral triangles,
the turquoise sailing-yachts of trans-Atlantic racing,
across a sea of blood, AB Negative,
which bubbles in the tropical storm of the saliva
forming on your wordless, O-pen lips
and bursting with a pop
upon your pinstrip
pillow-case.
You are a night-long devotee of Canadian pondweed,
a stone tied to your feet
as you drift upright
in a horizontal bed,
the tiny, yellow pupils
of your white eyes
flowering in your barely submerged head.
I wake to feed you
with the twice body-sized eggs
of ants
and the dried corpses of daphnia
which I hydrate with Malvern Water coffee
and spread upon floating, buttered toast.
In your sombulent mind,
they taste of marmalade,
the zesty rind of orange algae
that scums the waking vision
before your snailsfoot eyelid
can wipe it clear,
and dry land, at last,
appears upon the vast ocean
of your day’s horizons,
the distorted window-glass
of goldfishbowl, slumbering hallucinations
jolting sunshine’s reality onto your breakfast tray.
Decompressed, you surface in your birthday suit.
Page(s) 48-49
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