Rats

The children are young again,

chuntering and chattering as they climb up the stairs.   

The door has become half glass, glass greasy and grimy,

grimy and greasy with the passage of time.

Yet I can see through it, see the young children,

chuntering and chattering as they climb up the stairs.

Their father is with them, a leash looped round his neck. 

(The eldest is tugging him pulling him as they climb up the stairs.)  

He tugs off the leash, I hear him dial a number,

hear him ask quizzically:  What’s it with the roast?

This room has rats in it, I hear them

scratching and scurrying, there’s a tail

twixt the books and the brandy, and fearful I tug it,

but tis only a shoelace and I sigh with relief. 

The fire is guarded as coals rage in their anger,

and warmth beckons me over and I sit down beside it,

sit down beside it in a fat comfy armchair   as children

chunter and chatter as they climb up the stairs.  

Their father, black hair full of rats’ tails, looks

through the half glass, mouth open and hanging,

eyes startled and staring as I beckon him in.

He is gone in an instant and the door is quite solid

as children screaming and screeching fall down the stairs. 

I sit by the fire, raging in anger

as I don’t understand it; I don’t get it at all.

The rats are scurrying and scratching

in the space neath the ceiling and children

are screeching and screaming as they fall down the stairs.  

I sit in my armchair, my mouth full of brandy,

weeping and wailing as I don’t get it at all.

Anna :o]

The above is based on a dream I recently had, a dream that remained quite vivid long after I had woken.  The dream took its location in the first floor flat we lived in, our first home after marriage.  As bits of the dream began to disappear from my memory, I wrote what I could remember down.  Brandy wasn’t part of it, the shoelace twixt books and an old gramophone, but I couldn’t get the gramophone to ‘fit’ into the poem, so brandy it became.

I love dreams, thinking them more entertaining than television, and if dreams do have a meaning, a subconscious message, I don’t understand mine at all.

Freud believed that our dreams are a window into our subconscious and reveal our unconscious desires, thoughts and motivations.  He believed they are a way for us to satisfy our urges and desires that are unacceptable to society.

Some of the dreams I have are quite startling and if Freud is right, I think I need sectioning…

Shared with the good folk at dVerse OLN, hosted by the lovely Grace.

Image: courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Source and credit: Welcome Images