Recurrences

The dream is ourselves.
~Herbert Williams

1

A plane explodes. A momentary sun
engulfs the quiet glades. A voice shouts, ‘Run!’
You cannot move; besieged by taunting flames,
you think, ‘Is this some sort of role-play game?’
then find, hung in a tree, your only son.

Familiar streets, it's 1971.
I clean Dad’s car for 50p; why no-one
notices the deafening roar.... Freeze frame,
a plane explodes.

He bags a seat above the wing, first on,
before the families whose facile fun
he deems heretical. They’re all the same—
these whores and infidels must take the blame.
Text ‘Allah ackbar’, squeeze the send button.
A plane explodes.

2

I’m back to where I started, lost among
indifferent strangers. No one knows the song
I chose. The jukebox whirrs, blank faces all
dismiss me. Uninvited to the ball,
you sweep the stairs. We never will belong.

It’s carnivale, glimpsed amongst the throng
despite the pucinella mask, your long
black cape, I know it’s you. I call and call—
I’m back to where I started—

you stretched, unclothed, upon a white chaise longue,
I’m sketching you, it always comes out wrong—
I cannot capture how the sunlight falls
across your shoulders like a white lace shawl,
I’m back to where I started.

3

Again the same white room behind each door.
No one talks; the lift chirps ‘thirteenth floor’.
You step outside; your fiefdom's gone, the bland
Director's Suite that oozed with 'leading brand'
beatitudes, instead a corridor

of silvery light, a magic box of mirrors
receding endlessly. When you explore
what lies beyond, you sense it’s all pre-planned.
Again the same white room,

no matter what the future has in store
or who you are, or what you were before,
one thing and one thing only, understand
the cards are marked, this is your only hand—
again, the same white room.

I posted this for comment in January 2007. I never have been an Eratosphere regular, but even hanging out under its Arcadian groves occasionally does put you in touch with some seriously serious writers as well as a few raving egomaniacs. The place  introduced me to a wide variety of forms and this poem was a deliberate attempt to experiment with the rondeau. What better subject, given the form's repeating pattern, than recurrent dreams.

The first poem is a fictionalised version of a dream that has recurred during periods of stress and unhappiness ever since my teens. Sometimes I'm on the doomed aircraft, sometimes it falls on a loved one, a friend's house or a special place. Part of my 'all your special things are lost without a trace' paranoia.

The other two parts are worked-up from other fragments of dreams. Part 3 seems prescient given my recent demise from management. My fiefdom has gone, maybe the cards were marked the whole time. Dreams, desires and fears, poetry's basic ingredients:

seduced by what the Muses say
- those Machiavellian slatterns -
sweet talking through dreams' DNA
Id's archetypal patterns -

words, like viruses, mutate
to spread unseen within the mind;
the writer apprehends too late
that given truths are pre-designed.

Maybe 'Adaptation' is not such tosh after all!

People like 'Recurrences', Anna Evans, Barefoot Muse's editor said particularly nice things about it. Not one of my personal favourites though, I don't think it is formulaic, but something about it grates, it reads to me as a bit glib, that's my concern.