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THE
COMPANY OF SELVES
In
dreams I am various me’s from past layers
of
bodymind-felt blurs in various memory chambers.
Usually
I am at my peak but always it seems
there’s
a company of me in hearty rooms or tar ponds.
Often
we’re led by a fortyish type from an office
or
a hustling liar with 30-something charisma.
We
get rushed along by a cad in his twenties who scales
four
stairs at time to the beds of wide-open girls:
they
whittle him down to the skills of adolescence.
My
little Pan-boy then flies off the roof, or huddles
under
the stairs from Dad or from atom-bomb squadrons.
A
few times I’m focused past fifty, fat and unfit, thinking
‘Why
me?’—why the pretty beach-girl should bother,
though
that never keeps our lad from having a go.
These
dreams, let me say, are not often valleys to sex,
elastic
ways into vaginas. We can
be the capable one
shielding
acolytes in ashrams, fending off the police.
We
sometimes get put on the spot, shamed by directors.
We
are seldom a victim. That
must mean on the whole
our
life has been lucky. Nightmare
these days
is
of work or desire baffled, family fears strangely immured.
What
I find interesting whenever I think about this
is
that I am a collective. Perhaps
that comes
from
long childhood days of pretending, the games
when
we were nurse or patient, rival gangs, parents.
I
am a chorus of voices, a Jewish wedding, a parliament
of
allegorical fowls all atwitter at once,
overacting
to footlights, via various hardwire switches,
shifting
bits-of-me programs made by other me-bit programs
which
are stored in those memory chambers, using data
from
the arboreal cities outside and inside, symbol-receptors
lodged
in me by genes, bootstrapped in the womb
by
a hardwired algorithm which insistently said,
‘This
is our acting arena,’ and later in life said, ‘Breed!’
Alan
Marshfield
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