The Divinatory Crowd of Dreams
Catherine Gil Alcala
Excerpts
Dream 32
I’ve got new neighbours upstairs.
I can hear their crazy voices
zinging up and down the stairs.
A fanciful man with drawings on his face.
He talks in a strange way,
he says his name… but his name is someone else’s…
His eyes full of flies seem to spy on
microbial souls in the atmosphere.
He looks like one of my drawings.
He has the same eyes without pupils
as the character in my drawing.
His mouth blows a flock of mockingbirds
around my sparkling skull.
My pen on autopilot, outline the lightning
which metamorphoses into a lifeline on the hand of the sky.
This man is a part of me.
He’s the reversal of life in the dream.
His lips kiss one side of emptiness…
He’s the human appearance of Morpheus
on the shore of a sleeping goddess.
The waves of his effervescent laughter
fade my drawing in the sand.
My drawings represent split parts of my personality
that have turned into spirits.
The outpouring of a premonition…
The voices of blood flow in the shell of my ear…
Some animal part of me blinks its eyes…
I turn the key in the door, my entire being splits
and scatters into the void…
The spirits inhabit my body
and the empty apartments of the building.
Night owls stand still on the edge of a ravine,
a raven man or a dead man in full regalia looks at me in the drawing.
Dream 37
A woman shows a painting in transformation.
Characters after characters appear,
as if new parts of the painting were illuminated.
Ideal strangeness of mirages,
faces swarm in the solar spectrum,
Enlightenment lifts the skins of inner lives.
I make images appear in an abyss.
The lady devours her lover’s spicy heart,
fomenting souls in her monster stomach.
Secret wounds of revivals.