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.