Primary, Secondary, Tertiary Dream

We (reader, we’re writing to you and me)

Inhabit what we’ve called the middle world

But might better term the primary dream,

Experience helplessly entangled

By the secondary dreams of our nights,

And the tertiary dreams of the mind,

So entangled now the order is not

Significant any longer—the most

Sensible parts of waking life as well

Could be as tertiary as our dreams,

While mind, by this time, may rule over all.

Anthropology is dendrology

In a black-magic forest where the woods

Sometimes grow with their roots in the open,

Sometimes use their leaves as picks to dig down.

Our dreams draw sustenance from anything

They can reach and envelop—earthworms, dirt,

Words, mycelial threads, breezes, storms, sun.

It’s gotten to where we’re awake all night,

And all day long the world-mind sends roots down.

Sometimes we worry that we’ve ruined things,

But why not worry that we’ve just started?

Our most sensitive extended tendrils

Slide through the narrow-waisted walls of time.

Chasing change in its smallest increments—

Though change may have no smallest increment—

We’ve reached two hundred and forty-seven

Zeptoseconds—trillionths of one billionth

Of a couple of ticks on a wall clock—

To wrap our sensors around one event.

Change devours us and flees as we chase it,

Down through the long loneliness of the world,

And if that’s not one strange dream, then what is?