Sleep (Dali), Sonnet #185
Asleep, awake, the mind is all there is,
Or so our waking minds would have us think.
Asleep, it quails before its own image.
In crepuscule, without the drum and fizz
Of coherent ideas, or evil's stink,
It cannot muster love, regret, or rage.
It shivers, blanketed, fetal, offstage:
"But what a monstrously huge I I am!
I span vast deserts and dwarf whole cities.
I am all ego and all else is sham,
Imagined vanity no man pities.”
A cripple on crutches, it mutters, "damn."
The world fades from gray to color to gray;
We're asleep and awake, facing the day.
The Eye of Light, Sonnet #184
The eye of light is a spectrum of irises
With two dilated pupils, like binary stars,
Slightly blind, in need of Man's eyeglasses,
Its cornea a matting of translucent scars.
Light is a god, as consciousness is a god,
Illuminations we require to survive,
And each is useless, like a cracked divining rod,
Without the bird in flight or a bee-boiling hive.
The eye-beam that threw a rainbow on my ceiling
The sun sent minutes ago to find a prism,
Like the brain turns sensation into feeling,
Near purity, a benign astigmatism.
A man is godly then, in part, without being
A god, though he can often go blind with seeing.
