dream

Callum Featherstone

The Tunnels of Leen

Water dug a new slipstream.

Caught running through stunned
Was me
Spun in this dream.

Down sleepy funnels extreme
Round freecoming blues.

By the tunnels of Leen.

A cormorant drying
It’s wings by a bank
Without need for green
Nor worry or thank.

Whispered, “I’m flying
While you all are sank.”
I smile
With dank pockets
Empty
And lank.

Brown trout and an eel
Carp, tench and a bream
All proudly swum t’ward me
In a fashion much pleased.

They shout..

“You might well be sunken
But at least you are free
Like a soothsayers unction
Rolls their tongue
Comes a sea.”

I responded..

“Yes, when I am sunken
I’ll return to the turf
Either dusty or shrunken
While you bask in the surf.
Aft asunder, I’ll meet you
Again by the stream
In no wonder I’ll greet you
By the tunnels of Leen.”

© poormansdreams

Callum Featherstone

The Beggar’s Dream

A lotus flower, closed leaves upon a lonely hour for light reprieve, before the dawn.

The gloaming, sour. Shows a grief-struck lowly glower. Sore, in sights retrieved. Pre-mourning awe.

All the while, a moonlit smile casts its cheddar gleam across the lake.

As wet beguile, twists yellow spirals, on blue beggar’s dreams of cheese & hake.

It’s in these Isles, of fantasies fine whiles,
the edge of streams, hopscotch landscapes.

Clambered stiles and climber’s trials, tribulate tributaries, where rivered oceans spake.

When dawn is broken, we’ll have never spoken
but the fondest memory in mind, always, stays.

So, inside a beggar’s dreams of the inbetween, there is no foot above to keep downtrodden.

There, lessers leap over the successor’s seats, and the throne is cut like a rug, from its top to its very bottom.

Justice done by those who suffered under its rotten, deadly feet.

Devoid of liberty, enough to eat, cold, and left forgotten.

Remembered for goodness’ sake,
begged dreams of cheese & hake,
in my mind’s hungry pockets, often.

© poormansdreams

Callum Featherstone

Slumber’s Crashing Visions

Slumber’s crashing visions, green-
go-under, Past’s collisions. Where,
I, sleepily, bump — broken, sev-
ered. Detachment, he comes, speedily.
Avoids, picking up, my limely, shrapnel pie-
ces. He unputs me, bilious, back together.

Wreckage strewn in metallic, scurvy sweat
drops. They shine on a motorwaying
shroud. In straw bedcloth’s revving night.
Slumber’s crashing visions, never wait for me
to cross. They’re laughing amber’s crunched
derision. At my tunnel’s, citrus face, aloss.

Crimson trickles: traffic lights; all red, running from, scarlet
sharp-brake eyes.

Callum Featherstone

Relief, awaited.

When dodecahedron bombs fall;
will you be my buried and sturdy shelter?
When cohesion is trodden to asphalt;
would you wage pitched and bloody welter?

Breakfast,
served at his majesty’s pleasure, often ladles out food for thought…
The menu – provides;
convicts, politicians, businesspeople, and, royalty,
with plenty to discuss…
Such as, ‘do the high and mighty ever dream of tasting prison porridge, as they commit high crimes, whilst they starve and cull the poor?’
And, ‘can beggared worms chew through royal lead-lined coffins from a dead beggar’s ulcered stomach sores?’ Yet, what lies in the unasked? The public inquiry into corrupt power, like lunch, awaits.

Relief without a branch
to cling to. Bare, shaken,
but, also, beyond agonising
disbelief. Avalanche met Alpine
Firs; a collage of bitter viridescence – often mistaken,
as, not life, but, death, imitating art.

What a relief!!
That’s the “good stuff”;
the pinprick and the poison-pill…
The Medicine Men have long traded in shady deals,
of jabs and hooks,
wearing labcoats lined with vaccined, pain-killing schemes.
Patiently making case studies of us all,
all the while,
toasting, our declining health,
along with silent, complicit and sickly governments.
Sláinte!

Encrypted night;
puzzling and studious, awaits
us all,
along with an unshrinking denial,
a half-blinked eye,
a non-thinked; why?
And, a nihilistic sigh. It is all, so…
insalubrious.

Awaited relief of a final breath when no more lies can be proferred no more lines can be crossed or excuses offered no more questions unanswered no more victims no more cancers no more derision and pain due to another’s conceited vision and gain no more losers no more winners no more abusers or willers of forgiveness.

Just peace; unreplicated.

And, relief, no longer, awaited.

When dodecahedron bombs fall;
will you be my buried and sturdy shelter?
When cohesion is trodden to asphalt;
would you wage pitched and bloody welter?