The realist must explain why he dislikes sleeping-

Just visualise; from being pillowed in reassuring solidity
everything at once becomes water, and you’re
drawn back under the hollows of your eyes –

slipping beneath the sheen of exposed consciousness
(a trembling softness on the surface of the sea)
to a pulsing blur of fragmented visions –

a twinge as the dam breaks; your tides of subconscious
loosen and mingle: rationale dissolves like sandstone
under the massing flood, smeared with distortion –

the ocean lives around you. A plethora of colour
wreathes between your ears, stewing and coiling,
sunk into the thickening smog of insanity –

to the vulnerable depths you have long
learned to fear, and your breathless hallucinations
mark a world buried beneath all your logic –

for even on waking, lightening, the rose-glazed dreams
still seep through your irises, and the world glistens
with the false glamour of drizzle-tainted stone –

even on waking, lightening, the cloying waters
swell within your lungs, that maritime hiss
of a world enchanted, suffocating your sense –

and do we really wish, as we could plausibly
(for I fear blindness to anything except myself)
to drown in dreams?