The Day Dreamland Opened Its Doors, 2006

The Day Dreamland Opened its Doors

After a facsimile of the original Alice’s Adventures Under Ground

I

“In a moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.”

Did you know, little Alice, when the wonders of drowsy

    boredom and patterings of proper rabbit feet

    seduced you into that long fall—longer and slower and longer—

Did you know you would land like an atom bomb,

    mushrooming into a history of dreams?

Did you know you’d lose yourself, confuse yourself

    for ignorant Florence, just for a while?

Did you know—How could you?—that you’d whisper the usual

    double talk in a dozen sizes, giraffing over that gentleman

    hare, considering the snuffed out candle flame:

    what would you be if that bottle blew you out,

    if your shivering reds and crown of white lost grip

    of the wick and dissolved like burnt off fog at midday?

And did you know you’d tread your own tears and nearly drown,

    sucked up like a sponge and carried away

    in a salty torrent of homespun sorrow?

No, you couldn’t have known any of these,

    or that all this near catastrophe would cast

    you like ancient clay of an unearthed world

    into the curiouser adventure of timelessness.

II

“They were indeed a curious looking party that assembled on the bank.” 
“I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit-hole, and yet, and yet—it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life.”

After their quick swim through the tears, the group unfolded

on the bank: the erudite dodo and Alice,

eye to eye, sunken in soggy feathers and hair,

and the rest—sensitive mouse and birds now grounded,

water-logged and worried about drying themselves.

So the mouse caroused the critters around his tail,

slick and snaking on the sand. He began his tale,

a dry one indeed, of royal lives since folded

and tucked away like last year’s linens, or the selves

hidden inside the curious mind of Alice—

debaters of gray matter fit for the underground,

slumbering now below her saturated hair.

The dodo proposed another end to this hairy

situation, tired of the impotent text book tale.

He led them to a nearby cottage to dry around

a rousing fire, where the birds finally unfolded

their wings like crisp paper fans; and little Alice

fancied a serpentine story, losing herself

in musings of Dinah, her perfect killer. Self-

interested and scared of the deadly cat, the harem

of birds scattered to safety, leaving poor Alice

alone again to lament—until she spied that tail,

like a tiny cloud sprouted from behind the fold

of a familiar waistcoat. With his eyes to the ground,

the white rabbit wailed his misfortune, darting around

like a jarred bumblebee, crazy in streaks of self-

preservation—an ephemeral spool folding

into itself again and again. And the hare

sent Alice, with a shot of its paw, to curtail

the frantic search. Off on her errand ran Alice,

only to explode the size of ten Alices,

having swallowed more than was safe. Wedged from ground

to ceiling, a monster caught in a house tailored

of an animal much smaller than herself.

A mob of rodents joined the excitable hare,

unwilling to wait as she shrunk in the unfolding

of time. Mere inches again, Alice freed herself,

no longer surrounded or in service to the hare—

and wondering, no doubt, how her tale will unfold.

III

“At last the caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and languidly

addressed her.”

Who are you? The question in slow

baritones floated on circles

of smoke from the caterpillar’s mouth.

And Alice felt herself being swallowed

by the words, the unanswerable

three that melted the leftover bits

of her minced up mind.

Nothing left to crumble

like wind-beaten ruins;

no new rabbit-hole to tumble

farther underground,

away from this manic land where the simple

can shatter, where lyrics

derange at the lips’ release. Where is God

in all this dementia?

IV

“Off with their heads!”

“It’s all its fancy, that: it hasn’t got no sorrow, you know.”

Hearts are the craziest—loveless

                bloody things. Logical:

        the mad ruled

    by the maddest.    A pack of perverts:

                    The purity

            of a white rose defiled    silenced

under a coat of heavy red. 

        Royal subjects loyal

            to a fault

                    & faceless, numbered

    not known.

Take a lesson from the ostrich—

            wrestle a little

        against your fate.        Make for the horizon,

    like a hedgehog, at every

                    opening.

Even the mock turtle,

    the not turtle,

    the unfunny joke of the bunch:

                he dances, takes chances,

            entrances with a song of his own delicious doom.

You trembling gardeners,

        you jumble of croquet loops—

    respect your two

            dimensions!    Rally against

                        the executioner queen!

An underground uprising—

    the headline bold

                in whatever gibberish

        font your newspaper prints.

The time has arrived

            (carried in crinoline by a little girl)

        to shuffle up this monarchy

                        of madness.

Prophecy?    Perhaps—

            but of what time? whose life?

    This is no ordinary vision

                    Alice.

                A fever dream for sure.

At least you resurfaced,

            with a gasp no doubt:

        like a diver

                who dove too deeply into the ocean,

                who swallowed the bottom’s

            thick purple & flooded

                            his lungs.

Remember this dream—

            sleep won’t often bring

    such wild

        haunting scenes.