Dreams are the dark glasses and heatproof shell the mind wears when the truth is a hot, burning ball of plasma and at least sixty-seven known elements

She tells him of how last night she woke,
sleep peeled off as easily as damp bandages,
so the world’s latest sadness, the one like glinting, molten tar
stung in the midnight air and even when
sleep’s weather at last crept back into her head,
knowledge of the damage bulked there
like some security guard on somber vigil in the dark;
and soon, in the narrow alleyways of uneasy dreams,
that blue devil morphed, took the form
of bizarre, misshapen, fly-black beetles that scavenged
into the Kindness Cakes someone had baked,
before they scurried under another pan named the Forgiveness Dish,
and, ‘Sad beetles,’ she repeated, ‘All the grief was there—
but as beetles, burrowing.’

And the man she loved said—mouth just caught shy
of mournfulness—‘Did you know, there is actually
a kind of beetle that can make its own way
through the digestive tract of a frog,
then climb right out, still alive?’

At first, she could have cried, for how entirely
this seemed to miss the point—but you know,
love is its own strangely layered card game,
so she pulled out another insect fact,
as if she held a two-faced joker that switches suits
as often as a chorus extra sheds costumes in a musical,
and she asked, ‘What about the golden tortoise beetle,
Charidotella sexpunctata? Have you ever heard of that?
It looks like a tiny mechanical gadget,
parts fourteen carat, parts completely see-through.
Often as small as a drawing-pin,
it levitates like a helicopter,
polished mirror-gold,
gleaming like new wedding rings.’

‘Huh,’ he said. ‘Hmm,’ she nodded.

And they both watched and waited
as if all the latest sadness
in its glistening black jackets
would simply scroll itself away.