Weekly Poem: Charles Hood Reads ‘Skype’

By Charles Hood

We are arguing about if there are pets
in Heaven and my partner in the miracle
that is marriage assures me that more people
at any moment on earth are dreaming
than are talking, cooking, making love,
or riding bikes. Than are beating dogs,
doing an ollie off a railing, skutching flax,
tightening a wing nut, fixing the photocopier
with a paperclip, or sailing to Byzantium
with SparkNotes and a highlighter. Than
are blowing on tinder to start a fire. More
are dreaming than tying their shoes after
gym. More people right now are dreaming
than are flying, than are driving their cars,
than are pulling all of the triggers on all
the guns in all of the world. Pulses of joy
and pomegranates fill more dreams than all
the water in all of the Niles rushing over
all the glossy lips to purl into white mist.
There are more dreams than snowflakes,
more dreams than wind, more dreams
than the planets waiting above us for
their turn to come to bed and ravish
the night by kissing the mad circus
horse riders and the drunken pilots
and the dead polar explorers on the
tops of their heads, on their hands,
kissing them right on their wide
mummified sepia mouths.

Charles Hood is the author of “South x South” (Ohio University Press), winner of the 2012 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. His previous books include “Bombing Ploesti” and “Rio de Dios” (Red Hen Press). He has been the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, an Artist in Residency with the Center for Land Use Interpretation and an Artists and Writers grant from the National Science Foundation. He teaches photography and writing at Antelope Valley College, Calif.