Perchance to Dream

Once in a dream­my first dream
A lifetime ago,
I sat in a chair my uncle made,
A handsome little chair of shiny oak
With spokes around the semicircle of my back
Just right to listen to beauty,
A waltz of the flowers or the music of the spheres,
Good to mold lovely thoughts,
And dreams of friends and all we could do.

But in the night of this first dream,
Innocent as I was, I sat small and chastened
In my wooden chair.
All around me towered white cylinders,
A forest of machines as far as I could see
Taller than humans and made of metal
White and clean and rigid
Like hot water heaters,
A malevolent factory making noise
With no sound, no touch or movement,
Pressing down around me
With its power.

My thoughts shrank to alarm
And my daydreams drowned in silent clamor.
Where does the dream go
When the night goes on?

No longer a child, I open my eyes
And see a dance of death in freeze frame
A motionless company,
Who belittle song and lyric,
Sitting at their long tables
Calling daydreams irrelevant,
Adding hours on their calculators,
Adding days onto their budgets,
Stretching love on a rack of line items,
Stretching onto a cross of good works
Allocations of documented creativity.
Is it time to get up yet?

I will name the unmentionable,
An atrocity so great
That to speak it invites contempt:
Bureaucracy is your God.

"A dead forest of machines is nothing," they say,
"And only a fool would believe a dream.
"There is nothing to fear."

I am 46 years old, and I am still afraid.
These machines are so cold, Mother,
They are hot water heaters, but they are cold.

We live in the dream
That nothing else but this is possible,
And this is how it must be done,
All else is heresy.
We reimburse numbers with numbers,
Call truth a commodity and document lies,
Tall and white and rigid.
Do not touch.

How long is this night, Mother?
Mother? Mother?

- Sally Clay
November 9, 1987

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