Why one should have pens with lights on them...

So I went to bed early on Saturday night, despite our overnight guests still watching The Aristocrats downstairs until 2-something in the morning, and had the most interesting dream..

I was in a latino version of The White Rapper Show (sadly, no steamy sex with MC Serch), and was riding in an SUV, stressed over what to write. The challenge was to include rhymes containing a set of different, random themes/words, and mine was water. Somehow I came up with a refrain of 'nobody can drown you like yourself' and the images of being tied down and anchored, and when I woke up fully, it became a little more full, but with less detail, images of chains of slaves waving in the ocean literally, and ourselves in the figurative ocean, some anchored, some treading water, some swimming - trying to survive, all in the same sea where those people died. Songs glorifying the bottom of the ocean and the anchors that keep some of us there, and railing at those who manage to get loose and find the surface. Questions about why some of us swim and some just drown, and all of us are pushed in. I kept flashing back to this poem I started writing after Katrina entitled The New Atlantis. I think that's what I'll name this.

I wrote some of it down, but I'm afraid to go back and look for fear of what I wrote. What if it's just horrible? Everything seems brilliant at 4, 5 a.m. when you've just woken up and you're writing in the dark. What if it's beautiful and I can't read the damn thing?

Ugh. At least my muse has a sense of humor. I wish he had better handwriting.