I had a dream last night all in blank verse. Well, no, I tell a lie, the dream was prose. There was, in truth, a contest in my dream, dream-sponsored by the grocery store in town, to tell the history of the town that way. The town, I'll add, was not my current town, nor yet the town of last year's residence, but some dreamtown, like dreamtowns often are, familiar in the dream but strange in life. The townsfolk in my dream were like that, too; I knew and didn't know each one of them. They read their entries out and each one sucked. They all could neither count, nor scan, nor rhyme (not that blank verse requires its lines to rhyme, save for, perhaps, a couplet at the end, such as the judges often like to see, but these contestants tried to rhyme and failed and failed and failed and failed and failed and failed). They tried to shoehorn famous locals' names into the fivefold rhythm of the verse. Their limping feet paid tribute to the dead, such tribute as the living never heard and set the corpses spinning in their graves. So, on and on, each one worse than the last, my dream, a fly upon the contest's wall, racked up the ruins of the poet's craft. How hard is it to write blank verse? I cried, asleep and dreaming, safe and snug in bed, as when, in dreams of soaring swooping flight, we gladly mock our solid earthbound friends, who could, if they but knew, rise to the skies, and then we wake, and put on shoes and socks, and later in the day throw stones at crows who cease their mocking laughter not at all.
There was one fellow entered in the game, a high school teacher (as somehow I knew) whose inspiration was to tell a lie and make a farrago of myth and joke, of dragon's teeth and drunken gangster's molls, of monsters slaughtered by Paul Bunyan's axe and rock stars sleeping in the one saloon, and other such improbable conceits. That one I liked. And did the fellow win? I've no idea. My dreaming shifted, then, to climbing up a wall with yarn for rope.
What does it mean to dream a dream like this? What import there from my subconscious mind? I ask you, Gentle Reader, if you can, to tell this dream and chase it from my mind, so I can go about my daily tasks with dactyls, anapests and choriambs or spondees, slow molossus, epitrites, or any of the rhythms of our prose. For now, I'll have another cup of tea and see what some caffeine will do for me.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus:,
-Vardibidian.