It was in a dream
in a low-light room
in a box of matches
from a pocket
It was a rapid friction
a flare of passion
reflected in dark eyes
It was in a dream
I sometimes tell myself
where nothing I touched
could touch me back
It was in my skin
in the evidence of
the scars, the burns,
the scratches
In a crying moment
in a chosen fashion
that a game of arms
struck like matches
in the beating heart
of a dream
pleasure & pain
are the same muscle.
Sparks
I wrote this poem in 1993. I was taking an Environmental Science class in college and it was so boring, and so long, that I would write poetry to help myself stay awake. It was inspired by a friend, and I was trying to write a poem from his perspective. This poem was originally published in the Garnet & Black Quarterly, 1994. Copyright Lupita Eyde.
Lupita Eyde-Tucker is a bilingual poet and translator raised in New Jersey and Guayaquil, Ecuador. She is the winner of the 2021 Unbound Book Festival Emerging Poet Award, the 2019 Betty Gabehart Prize, and in 2018 was selected as an AWP Writer to Writer Mentee by poet Maggie Smith. In 2022 her poetry manuscript, "Eucalyptus," was a finalist for the Andrés Montoya Prize from Letras Latinas. The manuscript explores her Sephardic Jewish ancestry and bi-cultural heritage.
Not Enough Poetry 
It was in a dream
I sometimes tell myself
where nothing I touched
could touch me back…. that was the part that struck me most…the being in a dream and able to touch but not being touched back… usually in my dreams it’s the other way round… maybe that’s why it moved me so..
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Claudia, it means a lot me to hear that the words in my poem moved you!
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really nice intensity build in this…i like how you describe it as all these seemingly unconnected things that make sense together…and often pleasure and pain are one in the same…smiles.
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Thanks Brian … I think that you’ve hit upon a few things: intensity, yes … but a sort of disconnected intensity, maybe. I think that’s what I was going for. Feeling the intensity yet disconnected, as a form of protection from too much intensity … really great comment, thanks!
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Very nice
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I used to write poetry in high school accelerated Spanish class when I was bored. I would turn in the poems instead of the proper classwork. I failed of course. Teacher suggested too late that if I had given here poetry in Spanish I would have had an A+ without doing any other assignments. C’est la vie.
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Ha! or as they say in Spanish, “asi es el futbol”
Do you still have any of those poems?
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Beautifully penned.
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Thank you!
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love the last stanza..in a dream, pain and pleasure are the same muscle’ wow!
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“Pleasure and Pain are the same muscle” says IT all to me..as the dark and the light make life for me..and oh so better a mix than to exist in only one or the other…
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