Part II, Poetry from when I was 17: To be God

“When I was 17, it was a very good year . . .” 

Here is another of the poems from when I was 17. I had just studied “lucid dreams” in a psychology class. My basic idea was that if you could really have lucid dreams, meaning dreams where you were conscious of what was happening and could actually control and manuipulate these dreams, then sleeping became a creative and god-like experience. What I find most interesting about my poetry at the age of 17 is not how bad it was, but how, like today, I was very obsessed with getting more sleep.

To be God 

Last night I was God, 

dreaming of breathing 

creating the snow 

before it was even cold or white. 

Your body was transparent 

your eyelids growing 

in the palms of my flesh. 

The air in my lungs 

makes me laugh 

and tickles the blood 

that we spit back and forth. 

We rub our naked nipples 

In our tearing eyes. 

You lie down but I prefer that you smile 

and so you do 

I stretch the earth folding 

it against the curves of my back, 

rippled and torn – 

blue scars of wind 

parallel to my skull. 

I wake in a jar 

of shaking snow, 

omnipresent, His eyes look in 

through the smog. 

I, trapped inside 

the bones of my head, 

run crying to me bed 

and become God again.