THE DREAM RIDER
Bob Ludden
http://www.essex1.com/people/robert/
The play is in our heads, and when its nodding audience
lets go, the cast will never sleep, for as the headless horseman
finds his road always to reach beyond the pounding hooves,
this circling serial may yet not die with death.
It sets its pace to greet the awakening,
or flashes back, or holding up its time
until another dawn, might then slough off
the most intrepid cavalier, or find itself his victim.
Discontinuity ,stuffed into the glass
as though by fate, might then create no time at all...or no criterion
to measure it.
We sleep, we wake, and always it is there
and never owned. An odyssey of dreaming
bears the scars of self uncovering
and scarcely lets us know but in another dream,
as if a tattered leaf were floating on the stream
and paused against an unseen rock until another force
would send it on with shape askew from battered rest.
And then in crumbled state, each particle the fragment
of a hologram, it finds its destiny --to change its universe.
It's not for weeping, seeing as we will such microscopic
shards . Go trample them without a care.
They still reflect the light of truth
and bear our substance underneath.
A misty curtain visions valkyries behind,
who rising now above our heads will scream in triumph
at the slain, or fade as rapture captures loss.
Still we must ride, though we perceive but that we will.
We would do well to sweep the plain with eyes alert.
Our mount will not fatigue...this trail of fantasy may blur
our vision, true, but only for a time, and speeding past another mark,
the path beyond is wide and open, and the posthorn calls us forth
to endless day.
