Writing Poems in a Dream

I was writing a long poem in a dream
I want to say last night
but the truth is it was this morning.
I mostly wrote it on the playgrounds
of my kidhood and in the noisy caterwauling
print-out room of a college I once attended
mostly in a dream. I took lines
from things young people spoke around me,
young people who were kind to me
because I had become harmless with age.

I was mostly walking backwards forwards
like monkeys do in a lab when they pretend
to understand human language for an experiment
or a banana. I'm sorry to say I lost
the banana completely when I woke up,
though for a last few moments
between two clouds of different types
of wakefulness, I agonized
over a single line which I'm embarrassed
to say was about the color blue.

And I can imagine nothing closer
to nothing than the color blue.

Except maybe talking about it.