Other People’s Dreams The lives you have in other people’s dreams A school friend has you kneeling Though your hair is jet black for disguise, No wonder you wake up bereft: like the girl you were in your own dream 'Other People's Dreams' was shortlisted for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Prize, 2011.
are lives no less. Tonight, for instance
you are kissing the proprietor of SPAR
in a store room dense with half-price oranges.
in the layby of a Scottish mountain pass,
grappling with the front tyre of a haulage truck,
the road unrecognisable with rain and gorse.
you are the photographer in your mother’s nightmare,
pointing your camera at her locked front door,
a dark room where the night’s about to stir.
each morning, you must gather all these lives
back in again and force a lid on them,
or hold them tight, walk carefully downstairs
once, the one who clutched a dozen
long-stem roses to her dress, until they merged
into a bloodstain on her ruined breast.