Robert Verdon, #169, Nameless Numberless Nightmare

A frieze runs through my thoughts
bearing silver jackals,
lacewing stars,
buffalo heads,
lunatic rotifers,
chicken thighs,

erupting mountebanks,

sheriff’s badges,

the Great Exhibition of 1851,

Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral,

fairy-floss macaws,
living and partly living, all
moving in
different directions
through distinct lives.
From my hammock in oblivion,
I can rise a little
and touch them with my nose.
I count backwards in negative integers,
my sheep leaping backwards too
in a lorgnetted, Münsterberg photoplay,¹
till I sleep the
inside a fencing-mask
sleep of social chloroform,
yet sleep to dream or wake again.
Am I Prometheus?
Tantalus? Philomela?
A tidal wave of sand washes me away.
I am whole;
I am inominate.

1Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay, 1916, Part I, ChIII.