to the spirit of stephen crane

in the dream a younger, troubled-days

robert downey jr

was auditioning for director

paul verhoeven

and the scene was going well

but then downey jr stopped,

overwhelmed,

and wept blood onto his bare chest.

verhoeven gently strolled over

and sat beside him,

and with a razor-sharp index fingernail

incised a design of a thorned heart

over downey jr’s real heart

with downey jr’s blood.

the tear-blood mixed

with the incision-blood.

verhoeven delicately put his hand

on downey jr’s shoulder

and downey jr looked up at verhoeven

with his wet, red-streaked face.

they were both weeping.

verhoeven so softly said,

“get your immaculate heart restored,

and we’ll talk.”

****

Afterword: This afternoon I came home from work exhausted, probably more due to sleep-deprivation the night before than from the rigors of work. I woke feeling refreshed and, still in bed, started to browse the Internet with my phone–but soon found the phone falling out of my hands as I nodded off. “Well, let’s take another nap.” In my second nap I had a dream substantially like the poem I have just written. I wrote a draft and was struck by the dream’s kinship to “In the Desert” by Stephen Crane. I then slightly rewrote the poem to make the cadence and language more Cranelike, more starkly descriptive; and I dedicated the poem to the spirit of Stephen Crane, one of my literary heroes.