Do Dreams Dream? Poem by Tony Jolley

I am watching myself, well a part of myself
Apart from myself,
Watching my left thumb absent-mindedly caress
The you that is the soft, fist-furled index finger of my left hand.

You are my index, My Love, the first and only finger,
The doyenne of digits who catalogued and kept my dreams vouchsafed
In your world without walls.
You set them free and freely to you they returned,
For in truth they never left you, Love -
Why ever would one dream-dropp dream
Of exile from its own Eden?


Why is it, when I’m writing that the thoughts I want won’t come,
Whilst those unwelcome and unsummoned announce their arrival with a drum?

Today’s uninvited…?

“Do dreams dream? ”

There was a time – a dry desert of a half-life of a time
I would wilfully lose myself in dreams,
In dreams of anything but the gutteral, discordant tones
Of a language I no longer wanted to hear or speak.
So I would court their seduction of me,
No, rather I’d run to the open arms of that sweet siren song
Whose melody and harmony:
Unique;
United,
Sprang as sparkling water from the very moment when discovery dawned,
A new breed of mathematics was born
And 3 x 2 became forever one form.

But now my dreams, themselves they dream – they would that they will wake,
For what is not has had its day and this they would forsake
To walk into no waking dream but love’s reality,
That sweet oasis-ever, that is known to both as ‘we’.