20

Sleep is 20

remembering the

insignificant flamenco dancer

in Granada

who became

important as you watched

the mountain ridge

the dry hills

What an idiotic number!

sleep is twenty

it certainly isn’t twenty sheep

there weren’t that many in the herd

under the cold crest of Sierra Nevada

It’s more like 20 Madison Ave. buses

while I go droning away at my dream life

Each episode is important

that’s what it is! Sequences —

I’ve got going a twenty-act drama

the theatre of the active

the critics are surely there

even the actors

even the flowers presented onstage

even the wild flowers

picked by the wife of the goatherd

each morning early (while I sleep)

under the snow cone

of Sierra Nevada

yellow caps like castanets

I reach into my bouquet

half-dreaming

and count twenty

yellow capped heads

flowers clicking twenty times

because they like to repeat themselves

as I do as does the morning

or the drama one hopes

will be acted many times

As even these dreams in similar

people’s heads

20

castanets