tail-end dream fragment

 woke up, and this went through my head:

"All beliefs must be believed /

Or else the world has been deceived."

#55 THE ARMADA OF DEADLY DELIGHTS

The Armada of Deadly Delights
Plows through a brackish sea.
On the lead ship stands a figure,
Alone on deck in the breeze.

Below there's a dusky bordello,
With delights for both ladies and gents.
There's booze and dancing and food galore
From the seven continents.

One hundred luxury barges,
All follow a course for the edge.
But the music's all right and everyone's tight
The champagne is chilled in the fridge.

The Armada is hell bent for leather,
The engines are full speed ahead.
They're sailing off to the edge of the world
All the captains are already dead.

The revelers can't stop the party,
Though they think something might be wrong.
But they drink some more and try to ignore
While they dance to a popular song.

And the men below keep on shoveling coal,
And the engineers bite their nails.
The ships plow on; there will be no dawn
For the ships without any sails.

The edge of the world's getting closer.
The waterfall to the abyss:
And the passengers drink, so they won't stop to think
That maybe something's amiss.

Alone on the deck in the moonlight,
The Grim Reaper is nursing a beer.
If he looks to the West where the angle is best,
He can tell that the end is near.

My site: danmanning.com

#47 The Greatest Nap of All

I believe that napping's in my future,
Close the door and nap the day away
Show them all the snoozes I possess inside
Because I'm tired, I'm getting sleepier
Let the voicemail take my calls, because I'm sleeping
All day long.

I decided long ago, to take a nap, my head on a pillow
If I fail, if I succeed,
At least I'll get the sleep I need!
No matter what I'm sposta do,
It has to wait 'til after Three!

Because the great-est, nap of all,
Is happening to me.
Learning to nap all day
Is the greatest nap of all.

#36 Something Written @ 6 AM:

Hello Gremlings, Lo: the threefast gripbooks sand the furthing. All creptpast sleeps do rumble through the gloamer. Earl-morning night bugs pray-sing twighlight creepings. All dream lore whisper-crinkle echoes fading.

Past doozing-slumber, hum of distant highway, on truck stop pavement dirt-grass cricket sloaming.

All sleepy shelf-stock shambling clock-bound watchmen, all blink-red empty intersection stoplights.

New daybreak sky-glow twinkling star-sky coolness. All coffee-clasping glow-screen web page gazers, All yawning daytime sleepy-morning shavers.

Awake. Awake the earth-turned toward the center, Awake the morning traffic making travelers, Awake the lost soul idle, useless seekers, reluctant students, craftsmen, slaves, kings and beggars all. Awake, awake, awake, the morning call.

# THE ICE CREAM CATS OF ANTIOCH

The Ice Cream Cats of Antioch bore down on our cities in their silver ships. Merciless, clear-eyed, and silent, they were precise in their attacks on our infrastructure. They quickly took down power plants, bridges, military installations, and highways. As an extra warning, they took down exactly one hundred water towers: a demonstration of both their power, and their restraint.

How quickly mankind capitulated when faced with the overwhelming power of the Ice Cream Cats.  Then came the humiliating signing of surrender at the UN. The Ice Cream Cats said nothing. Aloof, looking bored, they collected the signatures of world leaders, and then returned to their silver ships. Thus began the reign of the Ice Cream Cats of Antioch.

# IMPOSSIBLE INDEX OF FORGOTTEN THINGS

I wandered the forgotten corners of foreclosed yards, where rabbit pellets whiten in the sun, and I saw a vision of these things:

The formal names of every individual crack in every for-lease parking lot, named as lovingly and thoughtfully as a mother naming her own precious children.

Book length descriptions of every telephone pole. Poles that tower unnoticed along squalid strip-malls and stand unappreciated along crowded, fume-spewing highways.

The forgotten inhabitants of abandoned Burger King Parking Lots  - each parking lot weed, indexed and numbered and registered in the timeless database of unimportant things.

Alas! The cast off ends of zip ties languishing unclaimed in the dusty gravel of convenience store construction sites. No more! Each zip tie is unique, and each has a name and history, written in marble, illuminated at all times, and revered as heroes by all!

A map of every track of every wheel of every absconded shopping cart. Records of the tracks in the dirt at the crumbled ends of sidewalks in dilapidated, half empty commercial districts. The details of the voyages of every cart that ever buoyed the worldly goods in plastic bags belonging to homeless, mumbling men.  The maps, detailed inventories of those belongings, and biographies of the men who pushed those shopping carts are stamped into plates of gold and launched into space to represent mankind.

A caligraphy scroll of the lost forgotten thoughts of slack-jawed, Kool-Aid stained children with plastic toy guns before the time of the Internet. The thoughts they had when they had thousand-mile stares with visions of half-imagined, unseen, unnamed idealized cities. All dreamt while standing motionless at the end of driveways on summer afternoons.

The indexed surnames of every individual pine needle from every discarded Christmas tree in 1972. Where is that list? Does it exist? It does now.

A ledger of the exact moment of the fifteenth rotation of every tricycle wheel in Bangladesh.

A coffee table book of every piece of school kid's artwork ever created, one picture per page, and the name and weight of every hand silhouette turkey ever made.

Every stick that was ever an imaginary weapon in the mind of a child at play (playing cops-n-robbers or playing WAR), displayed in a museum. A separate, full length motion picture (directed by Ken Burns and narrated by Morgan Freeman) about every pretend battle each stick was involved in, and a three volume hardback compendium about all the pretend wars and battles. A museum dedicated to these sticks, and a separate room in that museum dedicated exclusively to each stick and an artist's rendition (acrylic on canvas) of what the weapon looked like in the child's mind.

The tenth text sent on every Tuesday in Taiwan, each carved into an individual marble monolith planted twenty feet deep beneath the dark side of the surface of the moon.

The first, middle and last name of every blade of fescue grass that has ever existed, their dates of birth/death, their political leanings, a brief biography and a photo, and a serialized commemorative plate from the Franklin Mint for each one.

The secret dream of every hog slaughtered for its meat throughout all of history. An oil painting of each dream on a 72" x 24" canvas. The individual name of each bristle of each brush used to paint those pictures. A play by play description of every brushstroke, given by Joe Buck and Bob Costas, at the renovated Koševo Stadium in Sarajevo, where all of the homeless men from East St. Louise (1963-1992) will paint those pictures before a packed crowd of delirious spectators, and each artist is paid one-million one dollar bills for their troubles.

The serial numbers of each of the dollars mentioned above, in numerical order, each written in Roman Numerals on a single grain of rice.

The world's #3 event

On Feb. 13, this was the very first thought that popped into my head when I woke up: "The world's #3 event was #19 by the time it was over." That was a weird dream ending also.

"I feel like an enraged fireman approaching a city near a garage."

"I feel like an enraged fireman approaching a city near a garage."

This was the last sentence of the last dream I had this morning, and the first thing that was in my head when I woke up. Not sure what was going on, but it must have been a weird dream.