Dec 9, 2015 Original Poetry

Morpheus Dreams of Sleep
©December 9th, 2015
By Vijaya Sundaram

I sift dreams, and drift through souls
Bringing stasis, wafting through
That place where poppies grow,
Whose redness, like blood,
Makes me nod, and nod,
But I never sleep.

I ache with desire for sleep.
I search, adrift, through worlds
Seeking sleep.

I cast my nets far,
And capture stars and ride the orbits
Of planets, and swim through space,
Seeking sleep.

Making myself small,
I fall headlong into human time,
And fly through their tiny,
Powerful lives, so full of fury
And so full of grace; I fly,
Seeking sleep.

And then, I reach your bed.
You lie awake, lost to all, lost to me.
Your eyes are full of moonbeams.
I am ensnared.  I approach.
You don’t see me.  You are elsewhere.

I cannot shake you.
I stand beside you, spellbound.
Dreaming with eyes open,
You lie on your bed, and weave a cosmos,
Expanding galaxies of voiceless dreams
Larger than a cranium, larger than
My cloaked, moon-dark self,
Larger than the edges of all that’s known.

And the threads pull me towards you
Like a lover pulls with the moon with her blood.
I see you, and I desire you,
Weaver of spells, my keeper.
For now I know
Why I didn’t find sleep —

I hadn’t found you.

You spin worlds, and I spin headlong
Into them, spiraling into
Quiet breathing, flow of air and blood,
And you draw me within you.
And I find what I seek:  Peace.

And the power of you, your sleepless
Dreaming mind, your clenched griefs
Your love of sleep, and of me,
These pull me, and I, Morpheus, helpless
Like a leaf in a current, zigzag towards
Towards the shore of you,
Seeking dreams in you.

You see me now.  Your eyes widen,
Draw me in.  I am home in you,
Come to rest at last
In the curtains behind your eyes,
Poet of my sleep,
Dreaming of me.

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Tags: #Love, #Writing 101, Dreaming, Morpheus, Poetry Day 3, Sleep

Feb 19, 2013 Awake in Dream Time - Journal Entries about the almost real, the surreal and the unreal, Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries

The Red Rectangle 
© By Vijaya Sundaram
Written on Thursday, Jan. 25th, 2006
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I am an imposter in the world of the real.

Yesterday, I went to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and had an atavistic encounter with art — in the room that contained the “red rectangle.”  I cannot remember the name of the installation artist, because my mind was busily paper-shredding all the petty numbers I had to rustle up to “feed the beast” (that remarkable phrase which my husband kindly created for me when I ranted petulantly about submitting quarterly grades for my eighth graders).  This beast demanded a sacrifice.  Numbers satisfied it.

So, there I sat on a subway train rumbling angrily through Cambridge into Boston, seated beside my Head of the Department of English, while internally stacking up inventive curses against an administration which demanded that we turn our grades in before noon on an “Early Release Day.”

The rest of the afternoon was to be a “professional day,” with the English and History departments taking a trip to the ICA.  Most of us wanted to be back at school, being PROFESSIONAL, and doing our grading without the added pressure of taking the “T” all the way to the waterfront by 12:30. p.m.  Three, tearful, silent meltdowns between school and there and out did not make me look very professional, I admit, but I didn’t care.  Weariness was hugging my bones, and exhaustion was curled up in a fetal position in my cerebral cortex, hiccuping, vibrating in my ganglions.

So, there I was at the ICA, not in the least bit in the mood for modern art, fully prepared to be cynical and criticize everything, just because … and there it was:  The Red Rectangle.

It looked kind.  I looked, hypnotized, into that glowing red rectangle, and walked towards it, thinking, “Is it real?”  It seemed to be a bi-dimensional red thing on the wall, pretending to be art.  I walked closer, impelled, in spite of myself, by its arterial redness, a translucent ruby-red, space-less projection – and bumped into a wall that stopped at my waist.

I put out my hand, thinking, “It’s not real, is it?”  My hand went through the redness, catching air, crimson air that escaped easily.  I had been expecting a wall.  Instead, beyond it was space – a red space, like a room that was hard to see.  It seemed like a cradle for a star or a planet.  It was outer space in an alternate reality.  It carried the primordial promise and message of blood.  It was a womb.  It wasn’t an angry red.  It looked peaceful.

I felt my breath turn into a many-edged diamond in my throat, crystallizing into sharp points. I looked vaguely about me, and everyone who was there seemed to recede into the far reaches of reality.

What was I doing here, on the outside?  I needed to be in there, inside, in that alternate world.  I would make my home there, in a nest of straw, a nest of dreams, and plump myself up, ruffle my feathers, stick my head in softness that was everywhere and nowhere, curl up, and fall fast asleep never to wake up for a hundred years, waking up in dream-time.  I would escape reality forever.  My home was in the land of the unreal, more real to me than this world.

The diamond dissolved.  This was home.
It would be the world of the unreal real.
I would not be an imposter there.

And I would carry that red rectangle back with me, deep within my womb back into the world of the real.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~TheEnd~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tags: #Peace, Art, Boston, Dream Time, Dreaming, grades, Institute of Contemporary Art, teachers, womb