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The Neurotics
We gave one third of the time as a hostage to sleep,
Partly to repair the tissue, chiefly a search
For some gold continent we never found.
We met them all in the country we made in bed:
The mothers and fathers of course disguised
As animals, the friends taller than ourselves
In masks, the enemy dropping us from great heights,
The sister or the brother extruded
Like a thorn in the otherwise immaculate garden
Of unreal flowers, of special moths.
Sometimes everyone in the dream was the dreamer.
Still we could not acknowledge or assemble him;
Still looking beyond logic for the sacred ego,
We ran headlong into the night's remarkable glass.
It was too hard to be strictly alive:
From the nightdream to the daydream we rode
On a rocking-horse in the attic
Of an odd street we could not name.
While we gave one third of the years
to a kind of sleep,
Sailing intently for the blue coast
that does not exist,
The burly ones, under our white eyelids,
absconded with a world.