​Speaking of Dreams…by John M. Davis

Dreams #1, by Jacob Lawrence (USA) 1965

​Speaking of Dreams… 

​after Langston Hughes, d. 1967
 
I never dreamed of a two-room walk-up                                                                    
with its shared bath at the end of the hall.  
never saw it coming.  how could I imagine
bright neon lights that colour black nights so blue?
 
what reason would I have to invent an old black man 
singing from his fire escape a tune no one learns?
 
young, it didn’t matter that most dreams 
popped like water drops on a hot pan-- from hard metal 
to thin air, in less time than it takes to ask who cares?  
but after years of long days and endless work, 
even delayed dreams just decay and melt away. 
no good dreams follow on years of sneers, 
jeers and icy contempt, on denials and outright deception, 
on the phony facts and fairytales of idiot ideologies…
caged birds, we sing the sting of dreams, 
see the face of race
and watch our hopes fade to black and white, 
to nightmares, 
delusions, 
hallucinations
and, often, at the very bottom of this pit, 
smack and crack, 
the rack and ruin of gangster death.
despair and violence thrive in this rot, 
in the prejudice and poverty that persist, 
in the boot and shoot of the slumlord’s rooms 
and star-like bullet holes 
around yet another new, black moon.

John M. Davis

John M. Davis currently lives in Visalia, California.  His poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Descant, The Comstock Review, Gyroscope Review, Bloodroot Literary Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, Constellations and Reunion: The Dallas Review. The Mojave, a chapbook, was published by the Dallas Community Poets.