In my dream I was surrounded by seraphs
wearing morning suits, looking at me
quizzically in the crowded Parliament. Then I was being chased
by a Russian mountain lion who drooled a lot
then I was being covered in a forest of hands,
then just gloves, swarming all over me
like a furious blanket. Take care,
said the concierge, rattling her keys. No excuses,
now, no dallying with your desire
for a hot chocolate, no tales to the elected members about
how you were late because of the thousands of motes
that clouded your eyesight, though
your eyes were working fine yesterday, days ago,
weeks ago, why, I spotted you reading the papers
in a café just down the street, it was ordained
that someone see you, all by itself
it ordained itself. Don’t listen, they’re liars,
all of them, crowding the Assembly, each
one the worst of them, full of a passionate intensity.
Don’t you feel that? Employ the First Gear first,
then the Second, and so forth, driving on
the gravelled path at first, then erratically onto the lawn,
ruining the flower-beds, squashing the loaves of bread
laid out for the inhabitants of the dream –

gosh, I’d forgotten that, the flush of madness
that made you dream of a dribbling puma, itself
slightly crazy, drooling just a little
at the memory of its several selves
and their good electoral intentions,
how its very best intentions always get
changed horribly into some kind of bad memory,
like the time it attacked a harmless gnome
that was guarding the garden. Who instructed
you to grab your whip and then frighten it
so that it ran off into the night, so that it
was caught frozen in the approaching headlights,
the darkness filled with nothing but its empty roar?

The Puma in the Duma’  began as a draft using the end-words of the poem ‘Wakefulness’ by John Ashbery.