I lay on a beach with Nina. I stuck a shell on her body and designed a fabulous line of prosthetics...
A surreal dream of a levitating man reeled in like a kite, the night after I’d flown from New York to Hawai’i...
After he died, I dreamed that the phone rang and when I said "hello"...
The Big Bang happens, you're inspired, you make something of it... then what? The Big Whimper?
The jeweled fish over San Francisco grew and grew until it landed and they spoke the secret code to me...
Are dreams really so ephemeral? Lewis Carroll, who built the Alice books from dream-fragments, wasn't so sure...
In spring the young allergic longs for the lusty world but cannot join the All-Orgy...
I'm a ghost watching future archeologists dig up a site of my people--and get it so wrong...
Blake dreams he's a young queen with an uneasy relationship to her guardian angel...
At a party in Animal Heaven, I fall for a rabbit-girl doomed to be human dinner. How can I rescue her? I'm Fate's part-time intern!
CAUTION: BREASTS, BEASTS, INCOMPETENT ANGEL OF DEATH
Last night, as I slept, I dreamt--illusion blessed!--that I had a beehive, here in my heart...
A child prodigy stands out in a chorus line of waterdancers. Her body and energy are a patchwork of young and old...
My dead friend Charlie and his sister and I are driving around Lake Erie. We know it’s a dream and he’s dead, and yet we’re joyous...
A jaundiced dream of an art show that spelled out just how deeply I reject the rules behind modern art...
Fresh off the Beagle, Darwin and friends meet three wolf-girls on a train and exhibit a Pavlovian (or Biblical) reflex...
CAUTION: EXHIBITIONISM, SPECISM, PUNS
In the cathedral, before the nation, I solemnly crown someone with my own detached head...
I heard a noise out my window. I looked out, and saw something strange...
Anti-ideological rant calling experience water and belief... ice.
A knight falls in love with a fey woman, until her previous victims warn him in a nightmare that she is...
CAUTION: GOTH TO THE MAX
George Bush leads a hill-tribe raid against the hill-tribe led by Osama bin Laden... and I'm stuck between...
CAUTION: ANTI-HEROES, POLITICAL PREDICTION
A dream-voyage round the world on the Black Current, only to wake up back in my animal village...
CAUTION: GORILLA MARRIAGE
While we’re off at work, blind Ancestors come smash our homes--and we all take zombie vandal relatives for granted...
On the waterfront, I meet a seductive girl. Well, guy. Well, serial killer. Um, I think I'll leave now...
CAUTION: HOMOPHOBIA OR SURVIVAL INSTINCT?
Giving up a circle of friends is like the collapse of a sun--do you dry up like a raisin... or explode?
I live in a universe running on Bollywood rules. I can stand the constant singing and breakdancing; what gets under my skin is that Bollywood Code...
When girls get their clits cut, even the UN takes notice. But mutilate boy genitals, and... big yawn!
CAUTION: TALK ABOUT SEX AND VIOLENCE--BUT HEY, IT'S ONLY BOYS
My friend stuffs a broken feeder with birdseed. I worry it'll attract too many wild birds. He laughs "Exactly!"...
The moon invites me to go flying, but I get tired of magic and just want to go shopping...
A perfectionist gardener builds perfect planterboxes while his seedlings starve. And so I left the burbs...
If you dream, don't drive. If you drive, don't dream. A public safety message from the other world.
An epic dream on the lifelong effects of unrequited love, compressed into seven stanzas...
As I wrote a poem on Caliban, I dream I’m him: taken to Shakespeare’s England, shown as a freak, I must escape to save Miranda and Prospero from assassins...
I snorkel over the time-reefs to an era of talking animals--but why do I crash on the head of rocker Suzi Quatro?
I'm a cheetah working as a baker in Coconino County, Arizona, haunted by Krazy Kat...
I touch the secret soul of a cancer survivor, upsetting her. To apologize, I become a goofy hopping god...
CAUTION: FONDLING SACRED FIGURINES
I was a wild mare in heat, torn between longing for sex, touch, love...and the fear of being tamed.
CAUTION: HORSE FRUSTRATION
Coyote's pagan parody of the Christian Lord's prayer. Well, actually, it's kind of sweet..
CAUTION: SACRILEGE, ESPECIALLY THE BIT ABOUT TEMPTATION
Crazy Jane watches a dancing couple's passionate games, and envies even their hate; to her, it's part of love...
My friend's mom is a witch-smeller, who judges apprentice shamans. But when a boy dreams he's a crocodile, watch out!
On the Euphrates, one crocodile eats all his kin, bloating monstrously. But when a winged ship appears, he feigns remorse...
I'm a girl in rural Victorian England working as the county's magical protector. I have my hands full: a gang of ne'er-do-wells led by Ann So-And-So has found refuge in an invisibility tree! Showdown at the oak...
I'm trapped in a cutesy cartoon universe! Worse, to judge a beauty contest, I have to see past our style to our souls...
We were as if brother and sister of old in the desert land; they sold us in slavery together before this life had begun...
I always wrote some letters strangely--my 'd' was nearly illegible. So I set out to retrain my deep motor skills...
After my mom's death, my dad starts dating again, while I hide out and wince. Can't I do anything positive?
I just watch as all the dance students practice the jive step. I think I already know that one...
Deanna Troy and I meet an alarming man atop a Mayan pyramid. Who will be the sacrifice?...
A catalog of American addictions and the absurd distinctions we make between them....
CAUTION: EMBARRASSING DRUG LIST
A Marin girl finds a dirty secret in the school library, and identifies with the discarded books--and people...
Dr Who kills his best friend, a huge white tern, on a whim. Furious, I demand a rewrite...
CAUTION: WANTON MURDER
A doctor lures me into his office. What he turns out to be scares me less than how I defend myself...
CAUTION: VIOLENCE, ARACHNOPHOBIA
Dr Who, that BBC perennial, allies with Death. An alarming turn-around! What's he up to?
CAUTION: NICE ALIEN GOES BAD?
Around royalty, protocol gets complex. I love the Dog King; despite her title she's female. Does that make her a...
4 AM. A train wakes us all. We watch it pass, thinking of lost friends. And then I wake again to find...
I find my lover sharing our secret joke with another. But I already knew I'd lost her! Why'd my dream salt the wound?
A mysterious night-encounter with a shapeshifting spiritwoman as elusive as Roethke’s poetry...
A high place at night. The lights of a great city below. I step off into the air, and dance...
The goddess of Night is in love with me, but I'm married, and tired, and just full of excuses...
"But what is wrong with my friends' faces? Why have they changed that way to wood?"
I have no roots but those I steal--until my father leads me to a sacred tree, saying "Look to your mother"...
Distilling a dream to one key image can clarify it. But don't be ruled totally by traditional haiku form...
Daily dream-poems in haiku style, nonstop for a month. A flood of animals, revenant ghosts, sex changes...
One dream-poem in haiku style each day for a month! Ghosts, snow, penguins, yoga babies, elves who leave their tree...
Dream poems laid out like a calendar. Themes? Horses, camels, abused girls, vampires--all want their freedom...
Dream haiku laid out like a calendar. Roswila's favorite is the pirate, but mine is the were-salamander...
Terse dreamlets quietly catch World War I's effect on civilians far behind the front. Who died in the trenches? Faith...
Each morning when I wake, I write one dream as a poem. What’ll emerge by the hundredth day?
My new editor starts rejecting my poems. My new new editor rewrites them for me. I feel lucky not to be arrested...
On a volcano's rim, watching the lava fountains, I interview a huge blue alien bird who never planned to be a monk...
Money, power, race and gender don't stifle my friends who work as much as hierarchical structure...
A watershed dream for me, since my relationship with my father was, shall I say, conflicted...
CAUTION: ABUSE ISSUES
That levitating bear's not tightrope-walking--she rides a goat strung like soap-on-a-rope. A goat that's me! I'm eating...
CAUTION: UGH!
As I write a sad sex dream, a madman curls up fetally in the road outside my window. I'm slow to call 9-1-1, and...
We see patterns everywhere... but that also means we relegate nonpatterns to the background...
I meet a monster--half earthworm, half giraffe. Then I realize she’s kind of cute...
I meet William Blake! He says "The will is given us that we may know the delights of surrender." While in my bedroom...
Dreamwork takes discipline, but writing and painting dreams for others takes even more: courage!
In the richest regions of the sea, dead stuff wells up to meet the light. Do we have similar zones?
The goddess of the Cult of Clutter catches a little thief, and tastes her to see if she’s worthy...
Decades ago, I was too shy to talk to Frances. Now I'm going upstairs with a girl who looks like her but...
After a year of intense dreamwork, Berryman rejects Freud and accepts open-ended dreaming...
CAUTION: SIXTIES STONER REBELLING AGAINST SPELLING... and grammar... and punctuation...
I was single and tired of kissing frogs. Then I realized--I AM one. Or worse: a pretentious polliwog...
My horse and I dove into a lagoon and sought buried treasure on the sea-floor. What are we really after?
A narrative mural on the sexiness of dancers, as I became one--at the moment I lost my old geeky self...
Viga-Glum dreamt a giant spirit asked to enter his home. "She must be the spirit-guide of my grandfather in Norway. He is dead...
Gisli had two spirit-wives who told him in dreams how to evade the bounty-hunters after him... for 13 years!
I dreamt of a couple who toss out a shabby hen that lays golden eggs. She becomes an eagle and carries me off to...
Nightwalkers lured our empath away. We come to their castle to rescue her. Pregnant with magic, will she come or stay?
So I looked out my window and saw this guy burying a tiny robed woman in a trench in the street...
A biracial girl doubts her own heritage; a human friend has to confirm the obvious. So what am I blind to?
A lecturer tries to help the homeless founder of Hamm's Beer, robbed by bankers. But the talk may harm more than help...
A Buddhist scroll shows me Hell Cafe, where diners become entrees. But I read the scroll backwards! You can escape Hell just by walking out, against the traffic flow...
CAUTION: CANNIBAL SOULS
I dreamt I was in the outermost circle of Dante's Hell, among condemned lovers, floating forever, in love, in bliss...
How's it feel to be an anima off the job? Is it lonely, when no one even believes you're a real person?
A musical prodigy has a gorgeous, unplayable keyboard. But serious creativity takes a dull, regular, ergonomic instrument...
In Japan, sick in bed, reading a book on radiation sickness, I dream of a restorative ritual for trees...
CAUTION: GRUESOME
I watched her dive into the lake and not come up. Her golden cloak floated on the water. I hesitated just a moment, and...
I must rescue Ann Soforth from righteous rapists, then Paul McCartney from a musical curse...
CAUTION: ABUSED CHILD, JOYCEAN LANGUAGE
A man in a castle plots against his enemies, while his rebel-daughter meets her lover outside...
While my brother was dying, I had a succession of vivid premonitory dreams about him...But I was in no way prepared for...
Improv-dancing with my sister, I get turned on. But then a repressed Asian girl joins our dance, and...
CAUTION: INCEST MENTIONED. OOPS, TOO LATE.
In the hills above a polluted shore, I find hidden valleys with huge rare trees, and realize it's my choice...
My dream characters aged and tamed until they sit in a genteel Victorian flat. Then a wolf rappels in...
A children's performance of "Where the Wild Things Are" turns into a riot-orgy. Why do I think it's all about politics?
CAUTION: WILD THING ORGY
That day Frederic, craving irises, fell in the water three times. At night he swam through a warm-water iris paradise...
Poem by Emily Dickinson on fighting depression, which I get when my neuroallergies are severe...
Soon after my friend and mentor James Merrill died, I had recurring, elusive dreams about him...
I interview my own metabolism. Trouble in Cellville! I've got strikers and usurpers. But at least no invaders...
When the school district goes bankrupt, students flee creditors into a hell-cave. But Joe Cool can skateboard on lava in the pit...
One wizardry-classmate summons strange beings; another's learned how not to. Some things should be avoided at rush hour...
I have to kiss a mess of cats. Fishy, but I'm not chicken. My real beef is with the humans watching...
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree (at least until that visitor from Porlock barged in...)
CAUTION: POET ON PAIN MEDS
My shamanic teacher lures me into a labyrinth ruled by wizards whose magic-monopoly's about to fall...
A dream-fable of lemons who are really orange-people infected by a spore turns out to be about me...
I'm Emily Dickinson reborn in 2100 as a peaceful breeder of hydroponic lilies, till my dad drafts me as an Arctic energy-prospector, where I meet a ghost, a fiery Beast, a new me, and the girl of my dreams...
CAUTION: QUEER-POSITIVE, NUDE PROSPECTORS, GNOMIC DICKINSON QUOTES
I dreamt an epic poem on a sinister ruined city now home only to reptiles. I woke with at least a hundred lines, but...
Half asleep, I scrawl a nightmare of trying to rescue gasping boyfish, but my dreamwriting goes wrong too...
A dream haiku of little devils dancing the conga. What's it mean? Well, check the date...
I save our horses from a fire, but they run back in. Then it's my family I must save from themselves. At last, it's my turn...
The Lord Chancelor can't sleep, and when at last he does, he drifts through nightmares full of baby lawyers and potted tradesmen sprouting fruit, and cutthroat corporate scheming. But that's Victorian dreaming!
A glowworm and nightwatch beetle help out a lost crying ant-woman. It's not always a bug-eat-bug world...
An avian friend of mine researches a whirlpool. But it doesn't want to be studied, and it has friends too...
My dentist (a Haitian Mafia leader) sends a message to my dad (also a Mafia don) by dental cruelty....
The image got lost, but the words survived, so here's the poetic saga of an ant that left th' farm...
A mare's brought in to save a rare bloodline. She's young but as extraordinary as her mate: part filly, part feline...
As a kid I was haunted by the parallels between Menolly of Pern and me...
A new Eve asks the Time Commission to send her back to Ethiopia 45,000 years ago. But they're shy Moomintrolls, not humans...
My dreams support a radical break from my past--to let go of possessions and friends in a cross-country move...
Inside my brain's a fractured legislature--a hive-mind where all de beez disagreez...
In Palo Alto I meet strange musicians in the rain, and realize kitsune aren't born but made...
A dream haiku telling of a dog-pack saved by the intuition of a mutt with a mangled ear...
I was in my mother's closet, trying on her outfits, and trapped in Hamlet, too...
It takes time to build yourself out of found objects and trash...
Renewing one's life has its costs. What if you can't pay the price? A dreamlet of warning and shame...
I keep feeling I'm a reincarnated rainforest creature just passing for human. When all I want is...
CAUTION: TOBACCO
ESP is like having neutrino detectors for eyes: what radiates from people's cores blinds you to their surfaces...
A poem linking the dawn of digital art to early, tinny phonographs, cranky film cameras...
CAUTION: IDEAS
A joyous day with a strange woman who seems not to be his wife, until he touches her hand and knows...
No Man is Island. So Men say. I am not a Man...
My sister & I swim round a weirdly shrunken Pacific, until, near Fiji, we blunder too close to the drain...
At the beach I dive into deep water to save my drowning friend Kathy, and find it’s not so clear who’s who...
Keats met two winged lovers nesting in the woods: Eros and Psyche, the last Olympians, worshipless...
Why couldn't Adam Smith (that fool Pandora) keep our glittering greed in the box asleep?
I'm a spy tracking down coinlike bombs. Fighting a double agent, I fall in love! So I suggest her gang rob golden-parachute bankers...
CAUTION: POOLSIDE SEX
In her kitchen she offers me shortcake. She's short herself, for she gives her all to everyone--only a bodiless head is left...
You'd think his Christmas wish would be "a new eye"; well it was, in a way...
Kate Wolf sings that ads are way dirtier than porn. But my memory slowly twists her message...
I'm in prehistoric Baja mining nuggets that howl, when pterodactyl-worshiping pirates glide in to snatch our ore...
While conducting a census of fairies in Golden Gate Park, I fall in love with an abused oriole-angel, and we try to heal each other...
CAUTION: AWKWARD SEX
A kinky seduction slips into something more uncomfortable: the Qabbalah? Or possibly leather...
CAUTION: EROTICA OR ESOTERICA?
I put a singles ad in our paper, but I just couldn't say what I really wanted to. Now, I can...
CAUTION: SEX, DRUGS, AND DOGGEREL
I don't understand this poem's symbolism or even its style. It came to me whole, in a dream...
As a boy on Martinique, Jean-Luc Picard wished for so much so hard, his angels have to work overtime...
A man I loved goes into the Jungian depths, but when his anima appears in the mirror-pool, his nerve fails...
Two mimes terrorize our art class in a stretchable bear-suit. At least we HOPE it's a suit...
Three big tap-dancing kidnappers is too many to fight. So I try admiring their kidnapping technique...
I get stuck with a one-year mandatory gig as President of the World just as Saudi Arabia collapses, and fools rush in...
I dreamed our family's black cat Persephone had to make a life-decision...
A monster's out to eat my dog--and maybe me. We get cornered in the barn...
Millay dreams her lover’s attacked in the street, and wakes to realize it’s already happened; he’s lost.
My parents invite me to dinner, but my mom chases a rattlesnake up my leg. Then I wake to find two holes in my...
A horde of demented dwarves invades Market Street, jumping up & down, shaking the skyscrapers...
I'm single and feeling shy. So I asked my dreams for an image of my true love, and got...
CAUTION: SEX
Blake was broke. Couldn’t pay to typeset Songs of Innocence and Experience. But his brother showed him in a dream...
Jeffers, that harsh, visionary, ecological poet, seems drunk on Darwinism, blind to how kindness matters...
CAUTION: BRAIN REQUIRED
A proud angry picture-poem during a hard time, when great gifts flowed through my hands...
I find myself sitting on toy trains and fake snow as I'm told a fable: how a herd of department-store Santas got lost in a blizzard...
I meet a female Bigfoot, who, to my surprise, quietly speaks my tongue. She's mourning the death of her infant son...
A hard-hitting rap on Satan's dumbest disguise. Yet he's gotten away with it! The shocking truth...
CAUTION: LANGUAGE! SACRILEGE! MUCILAGE! (FOR THE BIG WHITE BEARD)
A sorceror's apprentice describes a medical procedure her teacher plans. I sure wouldn't want that done to ME...
CAUTION: TALK OF BLOOD AND SEX
Animal poets at an open mic. My turn! And I find... I'm one. A creature who's only just evolved speech...
A summer love affair with a shapeshifting alien turns awkward when she gets a high fever, and...
CAUTION: UGH!
Alternating stanzas by very different poets, based on Roswila's dream of bellydancing in the streets...
An Arab shows me a stone he calls a book, and a shell that speaks prophecies of the flood rushing toward us over the desert...
My dreams are made of lovely carvable jade. Too bad my tools and skills suit our plastic age...
I play the lovers in a teen romance: shy abused boy, insecure girl. But I get tired of the script, and...
CAUTION: LANGUAGE
A love poem to the black nightmare I kept meeting in my dreams, who finally married me...
CAUTION: SEX TALK
My neurotic sister and I both lust for a girl named Sky; then I flee a gang of popes and lamas and mullahs...
tolen by the Fairy Queen, I'm made nurse to her great project: creating life! But her synthetic baby is...
I dream I'm an insomniac trapped in a flat full of snoring writers and reporters. Wait a minute...
Things start materializing in my house: first three tiny naked scientists and then an impossible fruit...
CAUTION: NUDE SCIENTISTS
Millay, suffering from nightmares, decides to speak from Nightmare's point of view...
A joyful song about ignoring your critics. The last stanza came verbatim from the dream...
In a desert crawling with aliens who can absorb your mind, I propose a truce, and gain...
Africa. My horse trusted me as we faced lions and fire, but to face the Soul-Board, he must trust himself...
Divers made of ice swept the Traffic-Leaping Olympics. Did they cheat? I sought my friend the Sphinx...
A street poet preaches a gospel of smallness, until he pokes at capitalism in a slightly too personal way...
I defeat the knife-wielder, in spite the blade in my belly I can't pull out. I may have to let it be...
Short dreams sharing a theme: the burden of a big brain on its animal bearer...
Through twin gates of dream--not ivory and horn any more, but fear and trust...
Three castles on the sea, lovely or lame: a Mock Kremlin, a Ship of Toiletpaper, and a Ship of Brick and Beer...
A mad old surfer of the San Andreas Fault, impossibly riding earth-change...
Skimming over the lake on surface tension as two sharks prowl beneath, I'm not sure who's fishing for whom...
I like bad taste. Taste always tasted like another Anglo conspiracy to keep me from having fun...
The Conference on Love has two sexy speakers. One says "my teacher's stalking me" but she clings to him. Love? Hate? Both?
CAUTION: EXHIBITIONISM--but what are these two exhibiting?
A stallion reared to strike me. He was all the fear and rage I’d repressed for 35 years. I cowered til a woman said “offer him...
A phrase spoken by a workmate triggers two dreams, the parents of this poem; it emerged a few days later as you see it...
CAUTION: POLITICAL RAGE, SURREALISM
Those Hollywood lovers in the tub seem perfect together, until... oh, read the title!
CAUTION: RACE- AND GENDER-BENDING
Dreams of my childhood--bootlegger dad, critical mom, gun-happy uncles, slaughtered squirrels, slaughtered Jews...
My father's trapped in a crashed car. But I'm distracted by a young man whose palm cups a living flame...
Dead fish in a poisoned stream, dead kittens in a pit... and advice from the woman who revives them with a touch.
A tiger-couple on an ice floe must choose: swim for land, or ride the current full circle round the sea, risking starvation?
In a city crawling across a marshy world, I find a detonating bomb frozen in a time-ball. Why do they bear this risk?
I loved the feel of the green snake, and reassured my friends it wasn't poisonous, but really...
A couple slips in and out of sleep, dreams, one another's bodies and one another's dreamworlds, trying to connect...
CAUTION: FREUDIAN SYMBOLISM, LITERATE WRITING
Alchemy demands I kill ten swallows. I refuse! Instead, twelve birds and I fuse and fly over a magic wood...
I led a blind man through a vast art museum underground. But focused on guiding him, I too was blind to the beauty...
After a day of nonstop art, I'm in rural China. Two women tell me their village declared them dead, killed by demons...
My family home's invaded by ancient Egyptian architects. So I put on my unicorn mask and eavesdrop on their plans...
All I know about humans, I learned in psychodrama. I gawked as caterpillars grew wings. Except me...
Trapped in a blend of Joan of Arcadia and The Tempest Tales, I'm tired of being the pratfall sidekick...
We lose control of our new time machine, which seems to have its own agenda...
CAUTION: CONTEMPLATION OF SUICIDE, CHRONOLOGICALLY IMPAIRED DREAMER
I dreamt Anacreon the poet reeled with drink and lust--and I am wild and wanton like to him...
A road trip through New Mexico mutates into a tour of my relationship disasters...
After a peace march in San Francisco, I saw us as deer, and Americans as dogs. Yet WE frighten THEM...
I meet my own muse--the muse of all of us, perhaps--scooping water from a sacred well...
I'm a Chinese kid fleeing the Japanese Occupation in 1938. As we near San Francisco, I wake to find it's all my dad's dream. Wait... he's alive again? But he wasn't a refugee. Is this a pastlife memory, and if so, whose--his or mine?
I slay the beautiful dragon attacking us, despite my regret. And then, as I sleep, glowing eyes advance on our keep AGAIN...
A woman I had wronged set her pit bull on me! Hand in its jaws, I gave in, and we both began crying...
I often dream of words forming on a page as their corresponding images dance around me. Here's an example...
This little man comes into the chapel, makes a fascist salute, and catches fire. He burns right down to his shoes...
Emily Dickinson ties up a worm she mistrusts. Bad move! It grows into a talking snake with a score to settle...
Our dilemma is, now that we have the power to get what we want... what exactly was it we wanted?