Mark the clouds as they settle in,
as they fall asleep over the city.
Mark that the city’s hum
does not rouse them
and note that the gray escaping light
is bent by prisms made from their dreams.

Poll the passersby about those dreams.
A young woman says choreography,
clouds dreaming arabesques.
A man says academia, dreams
that decipher the glyphs of water,
and the oddest person you ask
says snakes
because everything dreams of snakes.

That answer stands you still,
unearths you, separates you
from any cherished sense of progress.
You feel a clinging vine of horror
grow and wrap around your legs,
the very snake of it.

But be larky, challenge those snakes.
Gad about the streets with pens
smoking like six guns.
The world picks up speed
with poets out on the streets.

A poet can make the world spin so fast
that the shallow and the trite
will fly right off of it.

From Spooky Action at a Distance
By Howard Levy

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