An old man dreams

A crystalline sky

A breathtaking vista 

Perhaps a raven

Riding a thermal above a ridgetop

   A sweltering summer night

   An airless bedroom

   An uneasy sleep, uneasy dreams

   Damp twisted sheets

On the ridgetop, a storm

Thunder rumbling

Lightning popping, air ozoned

No shelter 

   A wide-open bedroom window 

   A cooling breeze

   Sheet pulled to the chin

   Dreamless sleep, or sleep sweet-dreamed

—

When I was in high school I had a summer job in the city (Chicago). I sometimes took the train into the city. The heat was awful that summer, humid and heavy, stifling, the air brown and polluted.

As the train reached the edge of the city it passed tenements, bleak brick buildings that were so close to the tracks that you could see inside the rooms. Each room seems to house hopelessness.

Years later, taking my daughter to college in California, driving from Missouri, we spent some time in the mountains of Colorado. I remember a ridgetop with rocky outcroppings, a raven soaring, riding the thermals.

It seems impossible that whomever lived in the tenements didn't have youth and dreams, hope and a future. I know now how some lives evolve, how one may find themselves living by the tracks, feeling hopeless and despair, yet still have dreams of possibilities and beauty.

The poem is barely a sketch, an impression.

The second poem is also about an old man, and the futility of ambition, of dreams. Again, an impression. "Interior Space" seems to be the mind. Sorry for such downer poems. otp is frowning. 

Macbeth

I see a field 

of clotted blood. 

This is my postmortem— 

carts hauling off the dead, 

the wounded. 

Ears roaring with silence, but for moans. 

Victory upon my shoulders 

in all its freshly hewn fetidness— 

entrails of horse and man entwined. 

This is my victory, my honor? 

Banquo, what? 

      The day is ours! 

Fuck off, Banquo. 

What now but fate, and tomorrow?