The Last Dream of 2016

It disconcerted and diverted –

both alarmed and charmed

and finally disarmed you

to observe this greenish creature

on all fours, who’d somehow

managed to invade the privacy

of your most intimate “indoors” –

the precinct of your secrecies

in sleep – the deepest cavern

of your reveries – on his knees

now in the middle of the last dream

you would have before you woke

into the last day of the year: not

a joke, exactly, that he’s here:

although he had the marvelous

intractability of comic archetype:

the sort who’d wipe his eyes

in disbelief at every oddity –

which in his case would be

everything he’d ever see –

which in this case had been you.

He cocked his head the way

dogs often do, wide-eyed

in bewilderment, wondering

if what he saw could possibly

be true, this strange phenomenon

of you, he’d never seen

a thing remotely as bizarre.

Now surfacing to wakefulness –

disconcerted and diverted, both

alarmed and charmed and finally

disarmed, you grapple with what

might just be the fun (more happily 

than un-) of this distracting fact –

“bizarre” is what you are.

.