I had too much to dream last night

Cannibal Saliva

Marijuana and Mozart on a Sunday morn
Plethora of complacencies
Of tongue, beard, bush

Poets fall down
Dream
Drown

— Steven B. Smith, 1975

One of the reasons I’m not smoking grass right now besides the heavy burden on our budget is that daily smoking means I don’t remember my dreams. I know I dream, just can’t recall them the next day, which is a shame because I have fantastic surreal dreams, with all the details down to nail heads and wall dents and dirt pebbles on the floor in full color and total realism.

Well after eleven days straight straight, I had a doozy of a dream last night, and of course it included grass.

Sleeping through last night’s thunder lightning heavy rain pounding against the window storm, I dreamt we were visiting a couple’s large new mansion and they had a lot of herb to smoke. When we left, I hesitated in the rain and asked Lady to wait in the car because I was going to go back and ask for a bit of grass to take with me because they had promised it to me and then reneged. Went back in and the mansion had grown exponentially, new rooms, new floors, new dimensions, like an Escher Heisenbergian Quantum Reality Hotel. As I wandered looking for the couple (whom I never found) I passed thousands of people of all ages and classes and epochs, some dressed in ancient long robes with alpacas grazing around burning campfires on the floor, standing next to business men in suits and briefcases and homburgs. I went up a curved staircase but never reached the top because it keeps growing. I turned back and went down but got lost, was suddenly on another floor with weird rooms with odd dimensions that made no sense. Finally found an elevator and said “Aha” and went to punch the up button but the buttons were in hieroglyphics and indicated it went up, sideways, diagonally and more. Lady finally found me and dripping wet from rain said she was going to make some chocolate strawberry fudge while I looked for the grass. After that everything became so strange my brain can’t even hold it or remember and I realized I was actually wandering through the Quantum Probability Wave and was getting frantic, unsure I could handle it, when Lady came in in real life at 4:30am, I woke as she got in bed and said “I’ve just had the strangest dream I ever had.” She shushed me, saying I was talking too loud and I went back to sleep.

She couldn’t sleep and got up a short while later to continue work on the online newsletter due today for one of her mother’s web customers and I sleep on into part two of dream.

Helen Mirrin came offstage in a gold lame bikini and asked me to wait outside her dressing room door while she changed, then left her door half open and arranged her second mirror door to make sure I’d see her change, then naked she got confused looking the wrong way in the mirror for me and panicked, called me in to ask if I could see her. Suddenly swishhhh, she’s back in the gold lame bikini tied lengthwise to a gigantic roasting spit on stage with the spit being turned by a gigantic ape and the audience is applauding. Then my wife wakes me coming back to bed at 6:30am after finishing most of her work and I start caressing her and she politely reminds me it’s the wrong time of the cycle.

Normally in my dreams I can’t see the nude details of women I haven’t actually seen naked because I don’t know what their curvy bits look like unwrapped, but Helen Mirrin’s body is burned in my brain from seeing The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover four times over the years.

When I was 11 and had finally uncovered my 12 year old girl friend’s bare breasts but not anything further, I had a dream where one of my aunts was in our cow barn and was going to introduce me to sex; she stood in the hay naked to her waist, her breasts visible, but from the stomach down she wore an old wooden barrel that hid the rest because my young mind simply couldn’t supply the details.

I love my dreams. Think I’ll repost my dream in London where I robbed a Spanish train (again to buy marijuana) and the lady cop caught me and poked out my eyes — but there was no pain and I could still see and the folks saw me as a hero.

As for the circumstances of the poem Cannibal Saliva; in 1975 I’m lying in bed in Baltimore on a Sunday morning in early summer sunshine alongside my girlfriend. We’re nude, spent, stoned, Mozart flowing from the living room, my beard wet from her bearded bush, my spirit & flesh happy, satisfied, glowing – when I hear the words ‘cannibal saliva’ whisper through my mind and I laugh out loud at this mutant merging of my cannabis sativa stone, my cannibal eating of her, the mixture of her vaginal juices and my saliva. I didn’t have to write the poem, just write it down.