Chinese Whispers: A Poem

This is a poem I wrote in 1997, but (strangely) never blogged until now. I actually think it's pretty good. The poetry of my late teens and early twenties was actually better than most of the stuff I wrote when I was older. I was much more painstaking about it. I'm quite proud of the would-be-Keatsian flourish at the end of this one.

It's interesting to me to read back on this twenty-one-year old poem, and to see how the same themes that preoccupy me now, also preoccupied me back then. Most obviously, a fascination with dreams and the dreamworld, in all the many meanings of the word "dream". I've written about that in many blog posts, but especially in this one about The Wizard of Oz. As well as this, a fascination with history and tradition and the living past, and with mystery. And then there is the dialectic of memory and oblivion, which I was writing about very recently.

Chinese Whispers

The morning lights the room as dreams disperse.
I climb into my clothes in awkward haste
To chase the morning bus I've often chased.
But from forgotten dreams strange spirits hang
Like half-remembered lines from an old verse
And fill the world with an elusive tang.

Where do dreams come from? What mysterious zone
Cut off within the dark side of the brain?
And why do these vague vestiges remain?
No answer-- so I shove the questions down.
But as I move my thoughts don't seem my own.
They frolic as the bus moves into town.

And suddenly the streets become a dream;
Their concrete blocks and Georgians facades
Seem unconnected thoughts some dreamer adds
Together in a surrealistic brew.
I feel life come unstitched at every seam
And everything I see, I see anew.

And as I disembark into the crowd
I think of how old times, long since played out,
Live on in noises made in every mouth.
All history becomes one ancient day.
I look around the street, absurdly proud
Of man, as if I watched from worlds away.


These streets, these channels of a common mind,
What were they raised from? Wilderness and waste.
There is no province man has not embraced.
His thumbprint lies on everything I see.
Where did we come from? Nowhere I can find
The footprints fade into antiquity.

And let them fade-- my head begins to swim,
This many-coloured morning wracks my brain.
Let life's exquisite mystery remain,
Leave unrevealed the roots from which we clamber!
What is a dream, but life, confused and dim?
Where is the past, but locked in living amber?