When a Dream Becomes a Poem

In a dream,

I visited an old house

Where students stayed like servants

And the scary old lady of the manor controlled all

Including the old man in the antique wheelchair hidden away upstairs

Behind the house was an English garden with gravel paths and hedges

But also full of hidden dangers

Unseen by all, I hid my personal documents in an empty drawer

Of a huge dresser with shallow drawers

A dresser so tall I couldn’t even see the top

I hid a couple of old books, weathered and water-damaged,

Bound with a tie that ran the length of the books.

I soon found out that I was to leave for Paris the next day,

A one-time opportunity.

And I went to retrieve my papers and books, including my passport.

Not only did I need the passport to go to Paris, I needed it to leave the house, to escape.

And it wasn’t there.  Not only were the documents gone, but the entire piece of furniture.

And every stranger I saw who asked what I was doing had no idea of the dresser I spoke of.

I knew I’d have to go upstairs eventually, but I ventured out into the garden

Where I was afraid of the unseen creatures and traps

...I never found the documents, and woke up when I started up the dark wooden stairs…

In a different dream that was somehow connected, there were vines growing on the

Back of the house, stretching across...and there were green grapes growing on them,

And I was plucking the ones I could reach and eating them.

Two tendrils stretched low, diagonally across the house wall, but the others had been

Trimmed from the top corner, a job left unfinished...and

I was informed by the same old lady that I would have to fire my brother because

He was the one who was supposed to trim the vines and he had left it incomplete.

And I never got to Paris.

**I found this in my Google Docs just now. It was written on April 2, 2016. And I like it.