LULLABY of CALMING – Do you take spec in your tea?
 
 
 
Lavender seeps. I expect my limbs to leaden, lead the body down through sheet, mattress-cover, into the machinery of sleep where other lives exist. Landscapes of folding dimensions intermingle at the drop of an eyelid. Alice meets Titania for lunch with crisp white wine instead of tea. Fizzing accents discuss our failings to hold the world in high esteem – it takes a lifetime to grow into a life, carry the bad, live like glorious humans. Some enchanted future morning I’ll wake, be enamoured by a rose bush tapping at the window, bluest sky behind. I’ll have forgotten who or what I was. A smiling someone will open my door with, Lovely morning. I’ll feel loved. They’ll place a little table on my knees with food waving its aroma. I’ll grasp the fork, pierce lumps of scrambled egg with rolling hills of melted cheese and clap hands as I finish. The daily wandering down corridors peering into paintings means it’ll take forever to mingle in that pleasant state of decay.
 
 

Irene Cunningham has poems in many magazines, anthologies over decades. 2019 Hedgehog Press published, SANDMEN: A Space Odyssey, poetry conversation. 2020 FIONA WAS HERE: Amazon. 2022 Dreich Press, No Country for Old Woman. 2023 Amazon: Talking to Walls, and Up@Ground Level.