Immaculate Daydream

Finished work. With luck, it shall be published in Rio Grande Review Magazine.



To Percy Bysshe Shelley


“A damsel with a dulcimer/in a vision once I saw...”
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”


I say, good morning, Alastor.
How nice of you to drop by.
Would you like a cup of tea? Or prefer a glass of wine?
Your face has grown thinner ever since
Your ship has kept on running down a dream.
Whatever she is, it’s all the same to me.
Well, so, anything else to drink?

How far had you run home by yesterday,
Chasing your sparkling horizon-line?
They stand on clouds, and so hide from your sight,
Nothing but shadowplays of
Your mind. What, you say, want to ask where
She’s gone? To a region such as time.
Spare a dime for something else to drink.

For they all have the same deceiving eyes,
And the same flowing hair, the clichéd
Heart of ice. Little visions call the mind their mother,
Whelpéd by a sacred womb of gold,
But still their souls like ours shall be sold,
Their humors meant to smell, a mouth with words that bother,
She’ll drink more than we do, and leave you for another.

Say, have another glass, Alastor.
Don’t stare at me all the way whiskyfied—
Or mystified, I say. I have traveled and tried,
Have even seen the shores of the fountain of life:
It don’t taste any better than that glass.
Eternal life is also bound to pass.
They crawl out of their azure aura and die.

"For I have known already, known them all"
All ladies with a thousand
Dulcimers and lyres, and have felt
The silk roughness of their skin,
Alastor, have felt them slip through my fingers like sand,
Like old candy, they lose their taste, they can!
A toast to their brief beauty. Yet again.

Such a shame you have to go right now,
Alastor, to sail the night again upon your ship.
Shooting stars don’t fall upon this earth,
Remember, please, through crimson mist of gin.
You seem to have grown thinner by the second;
Your lady, too, is the original sin.
Go off to die: your memory is redeemed.

I will bury the lesson on these streets,
Bury her smile, her treason and her tears,
I never touched her—pure, here she remains
A dream—