“Last night I dreamed this would happen” by Alan Catlin

"Last night I dreamed this would happen."
-Adam Tedesco

© Mark W. Ó Brien 2017

    Repressed as memories revealed in a dream.
I am five years old, seeing the world through
a rain smeared window. A tropical rain in a
tropical place. An invasion of wind toppling
massive palm trees and the sound of a
struggling, tethered white horse within
the arc of where the trees are falling.

    In the fever dream of no escape on
an island in an ocean there is nowhere to hide
when the unnamed storms arrive. Nor can there
be a way to describe how it feels to be drowning
in the deep end of a hotel pool while your soon-
to-be mad, unaware, mother smokes unfiltered
cigarettes, lighting one from the other assured,
in her dream, that I am safe among the water
babies 

in seas of dusk and fog.

    Or what it feels like to be riding down from 

an island plateau on a no pavement, pothole 

road:

no lights, no shoulders, no seat belts, in army 

issue jeep,
pitching from side to side on ess curves, driving 

blind.

    And there, just ahead, beyond a dip in the 

road,
in that place where the rain won’t go, what 

windshield
wipers won’t wash away.

    Awake on bad dream beach,
        colonies of bats swarm from
    below seawater-logged decks.
~

© Alan Catlin 2017

~

Alan Catlin has been publishing for five decades. He is the editor of Misfit Magazine. His most recent book of poetry is "Walking Among Tombstones in the Fog" from Presa Press.