I lay,
room spinning,
throat choking me,
wondering what was reality
and what was dreamscape
fantasy.

I wondered if I’d become as Coleridge,
if I should take up my pen and write and write and write
of things seen in fantasy vision,
of women danced with and light cotton gauze summer dresses,
of time lost in a solitary tick of the clock,
seeming to go on forever and yet being a moment.

Or was it longer?

And as the codeine cough syrup flowed through my veins,
I felt myself elevating above the bed and spinning and turning and collapsing again down,
and wondering if I would never rise again.

But determined to rise I was.
Determined not to die and be found by my mother,
wide open I’d died,
smelly rising of flesh
when she’d come in the morning,
but instead,
sitting up,
swinging my feet down
so they once again touched solid ground,
and did not dance in the air.

I determined to find me there in the morning,
codeine free,
empty,
and willing to deeply drink not drought
but the draughts of
Springville springwater.

If this seems foolish to some,
so probably seemed Xanadu foolish then.

And will someone knock on my door?