poemcrazy: asleep, awake

asleep i am awake with worry
that closes any door to
far off places or
resolution of issues or
closure of lists of things
to do to help to care to try
and forget

awake i am dreaming of anywhere
but right here where to go
next year and what the spring
blooms will smell like when
they are mixed avec du pain et
du cafe across the street from
a musty bookshop and what it
was like succumbed to another
atmosphere but not drowning
because air was delivered to
my lungs from a tank strapped to
my back


Susan Wooldridge, in poemcrazy,writes: "It's hard for me to see myself...A mirror shows me my face, a poem shows me my soul."

this paradox of sleep-waking and wake-dreaming was shaken into my consciousness so i allowed myself time and open notebook space to actively remember some of the places i have been...here's one of them:

...the whole group was moving slowly upcurrent hovering over the ocean floor far enough to see what was moving around below with detail but not close enough to reach out and touch or stir up sediment with our fins.  i always hung toward the back of the pack just so i could have a little space to move from side to side not wanting to miss a grain of spectacular sand along the way.  long sip of static-sounding cool air inhale through the regulator then an equally lazy exhale with bubbles percussing ears and tickling my skin as they scamper up my cheeks through my scalp to the surface above.  all of a sudden forward motion became entangled as divers tried to stop themselves short of something that took them by surprise looking like a pileup on the freeway at rush hour.  it was no real threat just the end of the ocean floor or rather the end of the shallow plate we had been exploring and before us loomed an abyss.  to earth sight it seemed we may have fallen like Wile E Coyote to a devastating wreck below but in our current actuality we kept on swimming and needed to dump some air to descend the wall.  closest thing you could get to falling off the edge of the moon to swim away from the ocean floor to let it drop from beneath you and to be stable hovering in this new atmosphere that defies every sense your brain and body has come to know...despite the depiction my brain projected about the little my eyes could see i was no more at risk than i had been safe a few feet before.  even now as i remember the wonder of this fabulous dive all the tension in my tissue vacates as my breath slows and deliberates and i am floating away to a worryless sleep to be visited by these words...

i am moving away

from the ledge of the

ocean floor to

scale the wall

that intrigues and invites

weightless in my skin

waitless in my mind as i

hover above this abyss

and breathe