Dreams are blunt! My longings slap my face.
Warm touch of mind to mine,
Or an animal body's ease--and then
the ache and groan
Of over-brained biped beasts
Burdened beyond our bearing.

I was a wildhorse, swooping free.
Red desert dust-plumes
Waved at a sweet trumpet sun--
And then guilt reined!
Who'll we trample if we run?

We're seals. Lie heaped in domes
On the moon! Rookeries on
Air-beaches, in the old dust sea.
In lowgrav mid-ballet,
We fluid seals are struck
Land-awkward by thought.

Then I was an angel, but no dove--
Hawk, banded, talon-sharp
Perched on shag-shoulder
Of my leonine love.
Who were those Morlocks
rumbling in the deep?
I feared, but dove in dark--

And I was an Ythrian once, a winged sphinx
Alone, in a world of skyless Men.
Yet... to ride the air!
Near-worth an outcast's pain.
But in that life I never flew:
I hobbled roads, encased!
Lead armor for the alpha-spitting waste
Their industry injected in the world's sore vein.

Then I was a girl bluefeathered,
Quasiprincess of our breed.
We land to rest in the human town
Along our route each fall and spring.
But windowleaping makes them nervous,
And so we creep their stair.
I try to squeeze--too wide my wing--
L'albatros Baudelaire.

NOTES

• The Morlock dream borrowed from H.G. Wells's "The Time Machine."
• The Ythrian dream is based on science fiction writer Poul Anderson's design for a plausible flying people (see THE PEOPLE OF THE WIND).
• The dream in the last verse echoed Baudelaire's poem "L'Albatros"; he equates the impracticality of the visionary artist with a grounded albatross: "his great wings keep him from walking."

Still, as the earlier dreams/verses point out, it's not always others who hold you down. Sometimes the weight of self-awareness crushes the overloaded beast. Me, at least.

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