1.
Dreams kept you awake last night,
those horrible movies in your head,
situations in which your body was slashed
by three-tongued policemen, your throat
a bowl for the doves to bathe,  being
chased out of light into serious depths
of thorned darkness.  How much blood 
is enough to convict these mental images
into a coffin and sunk with lead weights
to the bottom of the lake?  I want my mama
back.

2.
She said never eat bananas 
before bed time, but I was a kid and she was silly,
making up that sort of nonsense. I abdicated
such tales to runways of the theatre of science –
crude experimentation; collecting data a genetic 
predisposition. Testable hypothesis, visual documentation
with my kid’s pad of pages, harboring fat words and numbers
to illuminate the path to truth.

3.
Mine were normal dreams with tornadoes, talking
carrots, runaway bicycles in the mountains, and 
winning first place in the county fair for having 
the largest watermelon.

4.
I heard you screaming bloody murder at 3 AM;
ran into your room to assure you that it was 
just a dream, now. Just a dream so please 
go back to sleep. “One question before I leave: 
did you by chance eat bananas tonight?”

John Dorroh has always loved words and has always written. When he was teaching high school science, he helped his students "write and read to learn" concepts and principles. His poetry has appeared in Dime Show Review, Sick Lit, Piker Press, Message in a Bottle, Setu, Tuck, Red Fez, Event Horizon, Red Dirt Forum, and others.