George Anderson

Detox Dreams

I’m covered in a silky orange
parachute like material. I yank

it free from me & realize I am
attached to an improvised roadside bomb.

I am studying a group of children
interacting in a school playground

I take discrete notes on how their behavior
differs from the gender norm.

I am talking to a lady with wooden legs
& as I saw one at the thigh I explain to her,

‘I need the firewood.’ I have cracked a large fat
The length of my leg. Folding back my foreskin

I find a plastic black monkey hunched forwards
grasping its ears. A truck beeps backwards to deliver

bales of hay about twenty feet high in neat stacks.
I purchase a .22 rifle to pick off rabbits and sheep in

the local park. A flock of fluffy & brightly ribboned
ewes stroll by. I am anxious to start firing but young children

on skateboards pass. A young thug thrashes a broken branch
against concrete. He spots me & figures I’m his next victim.

‘If you touch me, I’ll put you in the hospital for fifteen months’, I tell him.
He drops the tree. As I approach the automatic doors to a local shop

a glowing yellow tube about nine inches in length floats along the
ground & as it accelerates towards me I step on it and it vanishes.

Last night I confronted a baby lamb, its left eye a gleaming yellow
twice the size of its green right eye. Later, it was attacked & carried away

by a large hawk into a nesting tree. As the hawk plucked out the lamb’s eyes it shrieked like a baby. Blinded it wails hysterically, the hawk’s beak penetrating further into the lamb’s skull.

*

I attend another session with my psychologist, Ms Drew. I hand her my poem “Detox Dreams”

“I was wondering Ms Drew, if you tell me what this dream reveals about me.”