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.
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.
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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