Fiction’s Waking Dream
by Sabrina Dawkins
6:00 a.m. brings abrupt
screeching blast
piercing night like surgeon’s knife.
And I can’t locate pain
as I recover
from anesthesia,
but I know it lurks.
Where should I assign pain, to ears?
But hands never covered them
to muffle the noise.
And smooth darkness shielded
eyes that sprung open shocked.
Maybe muscles would ache late in day
from recovery not completed.
But where is pain now
as I lay in black,
met by the screams of an enemy?
I placed it too far
for hand to smack off.
I learned alarm’s taunts had no legs.
But the pain, the pain, where to assign?
Early I rise
to memorize terms and numbers
and theories and theorems.
Fiction?
Could it be I’m still in a dream?
Did the alarm really wake me?
Or did I sleep on,
enter class tomb of pale gray,
seeing others with squinted eyes,
forward-tilted necks,
as we pour into our brains
cement as certain to fix
as the hole by pierce of sound
to cease night’s metaphor narratives;
the hole opening in me cement’s path
to pour death’s kiss of a waking dream.