I'm hunkered down, in blackest gloom ensconced,
my thoughts conscripted still by last night's dream,
from which i woke this morning in a funk
(perhaps to do with getting steaming drunk
on cheap red wine, which at the time did seem
a harmless and diverting ploy - i danced

myself to bed then fell into a sleep
from which, alas, i woke at dawn, dismayed
by familiar crowlike images,
dark, corvid visions, the like of which is
vouchsafed - as each loops around, replayed
across my dreamscape's silver screen - to steep

me in this addled stew of frank unease.)
That funk still dogs me, and it's dinnertime
(lunch to those amongst you who claim you're posh)
so i can't yet think straight; my head's awash
now with half-recalled dreams in which a crime
I'd been fingered for brought me to my knees,

appealing for some mercy undeserved,
and by those birds unpardoned. Thus it was
that, on waking, and even worse so now,
I felt the presence of that circling crow;
deafened then by cacophonies of caws
augmented to a fury, and observed

by menacing sorties of its crow kin,
I fell headlong into this black despond.
What quintessential truth, in dream endowed
with candour of a kind that, once allowed
its lead, should stifle me, make me respond
by throwing up my hands and giving in,

so cravenly surrendering to it?
How weird, the inner workings of our minds,
that we should feel the influence of dreams
beyond the veil of sleep: i've scribbled reams,
whole screeds about them, none of which but finds
more to riddle (which, one might intuit,

means i'm looking in all the wrong places.)
What the hell; i'll quit carping 'til later:
those judgemental crows, when i'm hungover,
can sound the most deafening thing, ever.
My need for clarity's seldom greater
than when they know they hold all the aces.

MP 13-161023