by Charles Stein

dream.  where the site of sleep itself
has been ((p)re))arranged.  I lie down
in the space
prepared for me
as for a guest
and go to sleep
and continue with my dream.

I dose off
writing this
and take up the dreamabout which   I am now
not quite certain
I have been writing (dreaming).

I wake
and am concerned . . .
but I do not know
with what
concerned.  I am
awake now
awaiting
the next bout of slumber.

Will it come ? . . .

When will it come ?

I cannot call to return to it.

But it came
somewhere
between
the
“will it come ?”
and the
        “when will it come ?”

There was a vast library.
Then I wake.
I write again.
It came again.
The people on the
café patio
where I write this.  Their movement,
their voices.
Truck noise.

What is sleep
that it lurks
like a small boat
in the mind stream —
then becomes the mind itself —
a dream of the mind stream
when the pen falls
silent but the nib tip
still dribbles
incontinent scribbling
down the page.

A woman by a lake.

Sleep while still awake
and waiting.

I close my eyes.

Someone is trying to move
an old man
seated in a whicker-work wheel-chair
off from the scene of his awakeness
to a place more
hospitable to his dreaming . . .

by a lake, perhaps.

by Charles Stein

The moon    lost      in day clouds
the noonday normalcy      its own peculiar obscurity.

Not so easy
to evaginate
emotion into form — or know
who rules
the breath twixt lung and larynx —
is it some mind ? some habit form, inveterate
hammer
whirling
furious
round the crazed mind heads of poets old ?

“Oh interlocutor, lifting the veils
of utterance
with timely query —
you too are but a form,
a thing remembered from some other night,
the primary point of emergence long abused . . .”

Thus I spoke
but a moment since
— myself that whirling hammer slashing round
forgetful, furious, happy, making form,
expressing and evading in one cut or hammer blow

Misery / Mystery,
Will and Stone.

by Dan Gerber

If there’s any former life inside
this almost transparent, honey-

colored cube of amber, it’s
too small to see, except for a

few tiny bubbles of ancient air, even
through a 10x loupe, just

the gold clarity that, looking,
brings a sweetness to the

buds of my tongue and the
glands of my cheeks,

to make them want the
taste of this parallax clarity,

warmed to the color of the
nothing I see.

by Dan Gerber

Faustus suffered, not because he bargained away
his soul to possess all knowledge, but

because the bargain left him with no
new life to breathe, nothing left to learn.

You can’t see far into reflecting
water, and with a breeze, it’s

thousand-moon-lake dazzling
and glares you down into your

other senses, the perfume of music, the haunting
silence of bees,

the boat’s gentle rocking in the
field of stars you’re rowing on.