Waking Up with June Allyson

I just awoke in stages – bumping, twitching, blinking –

from a 1940s sound stage, come to think: half pink-

furred poodle and half twirl-tressed movie star

June Allyson, whose laryngitic voice was just then

shoving through my throat as I awoke: came out

a choke of an unlovely bubbling: rattling, battling

breath: all reeled right into my awakened flesh. In fact,

my inner and my outer eye smacked right into each

other – both at once beheld the bug-eyed moon at

noon, the blundering sun at midnight. Whatever doubt

that where I was in dreams was any different from

where I was in my daylit schemes, had scattered

into misty bits. Miss Allyson’s and my voice rasped

in chorus: “Something fits!” I knew, as if by a decree,

the atmosphere above my dreaming ocean was made

of the same components in that sea: neither was more

clear, less real. The psyche doesn’t have to sneak

or steal to fill a lack: it never doesn't have enough

to play its acts – there never is too little or too much.

It bumbles, gasps and goes full blast from dusk to dawn

to dusk. I knew it wasn’t only in the weave of dreams'

imaginings that I lose touch: I lose touch, just as much,

awake all day! I vow now to invite my inner eye and outer

to reune soon. I’ll say,“Hey! Knit the day and night into

a festival of playlists: unite your dream songs with crisp-

consonanted speech!” I’ll encourage each to beckon

each into connection with the unimagined wonders

in each other’s realms, now no longer out of reach.

.