The Night I Dropped Shakespeare on the Cat

Poetry. "The night I thought I dropped Shakespeare on the cat I felt the reprieve of the man who accidentally goes through a red light without getting hit, the relief of the man who falls from a high cliff only to discover he's been dreaming. But the relief isn't immediate. It takes a little time. There are those few seconds in which the reality of the bed and sheets and room penetrate and so permeate the dream-ridden brain that the dream finally dissipates, melts back into the night from whence it came. There was no cliff, although the fiction of falling, the dream of falling was so real the brain believed all the whirling and twirling and limbs splaying and ground coming up were real. Meaning there is sometimes reality in irreality. Meaning a dream can be mud. Genuine as rain. The space in which I believed there to be a cat and there was no cat was that delicious space we call a fiction"--from the title piece. Seattle poet John Olson is also the author of FREE STREAM VELOCITY, OXBOW KAZOO, and ECHO REGIME, all available from SPD.