Cooler weather triggers vivid nights, busy with colorful dreams. Characters dance behind flickering eyelids – brilliant, startling, flashing, strange and frightening, oddly juxtaposed – unidentified, out of context figures holding hands and wearing masks of monster, friend, animal, god and demon. Waking in the cool dark of morning you know you have slept – you know that dreams twirled and danced behind your eyes – you couldn’t tell the stories if your life depended on recounting them – they leave unsettled earth in their wake – ruffled fur, were-wolf warnings and crumbling hand scrawled letters from deep within slumbering neurons and firing dendrites. Sometimes, a smoky parade of wild animals, sometimes jugglers of knives and flame – sometimes the black-eyed glance that you know better than your own face in a mirror – but in them no spark of recognition. No kindness in the kindest waking flesh you’ve ever known. All odd characters in awkward postures, doing things indecipherable, strange. Poetry walks arm-in-arm with this cast of characters – everything forgotten in the dawn of day, except what stays as a dank cramped dread like a vestige smoke ring circling your head, tossing to wakefulness on the pillow. It seems the language would pour from the pen if you could just catch the shining end of those silken threads before they slip from your morning fingers. I’ve read phrases of captured dream on the page and they bring a strange shudder indeed, like travel in a far distant land, disparate, disconnected but from within your own firing brain cells, from a deep cell knowledge you can neither recount or retell. Perhaps they come from the caress of cool night air slipping through the window coverings and sliding along your sleeping spine, or maybe the images come from a special glimmer of low yellow light, autumnal and magical – stealing unnoticed into the corner of your eye, as you watch the sun rise or set, or the fingernail of the horned moon travel the night sky. Whatever the source of the spooks, the colored stories, the frighteningly jeweled stones – gather the haunting they bring close in to your chest, slip them realized and unrequited into your pockets and speak them unafraid, as songs of poem.