A Devil's Dream Poem by Phillip Erb

Within the walls of a breathless instant, the entire world falls asleep
And another one becomes alive, opens its eyes, checks the clock and heaves a sigh.

Fascinated with lackadaisical dream visions and the conversions with vague
Silhouettes
Gesture so vibrant and melodramatically to muddy the conversation,
So the vagrants are too distracted by the confusion to focus their eyes
On how damn thin the locals are, talk so loud while their voices don’t
Make a sound
(the walking dead)


The waking world hasn’t the faintest inkling that the there’s a sleeping world bustling
About the business of the devil’s bullying: hustling the rich children for their lunch money
And the poor for their books and their shoes.

“We take from you as you take of us – the ones doing evil are them;
There is no evil along the divide but no one ever goes there – the Devil
Is alive and well and you look him in the face every morning as you brush
Shave and wash and brush the other’s teeth, ” the shadow man said all
The while I was in the mirror he
He shown me I was him and got
To laughing and mocking how
How our worlds work off one
Another.

I spit in his face and struck both our names from the roll call
for the price of one soul.