How, in his still-sighted dreams,
does Polyphemus rumble now?
In his Mind’s Eye the aim was ever true:
his boulders take the ship and Wretched No-One
past the Iridescent Blue,
into the Morbid Depths
where all but Titans drown.

I wrote that poem in my sleep, on a frigid night in a glorified tenement house in London, in 1996. I say I wrote it in my sleep, because woke in the middle of the night from a dream, with the image of the poem complete in my head, like the cognitive version of retinal burn-in, bright but blurry and threatening to fade fast. I hurried to a scrap of paper and scrawled the words down before they disappeared.

I don’t remember having any dream, just waking up with the short poem full-fledged, glowing incandescent in my own Mind’s Eye. The experience was as if someone else had written it, and transmitted it somehow into my sleeping brain – from another dimension, another world, the future or the past. Or maybe tapping it out on some clunky telegraph-looking device in the apartment next door to me in that shoddy building. I don’t know, it’s the only time that has happened to me in my life, in quite that way. A surreal experience – I would say I dreamed it, but there was the poem in the morning, scribbled on the snatched leaf of paper. Cryptic but not nonsensical, worthy of examination at least. And examine it I have, many times over the years, so many times it’s permanently committed to memory. I have no doubt I will recite it on my death-bed.

I don’t know what exactly the poem is supposed to mean, if anything – which is the way of good poems. But I have some ideas. And I rather fancy that it is a message, to me, from a deeper self that lives in silence most of the time, and that whatever it is meant to convey is important enough for that shard of my mind to make a once-in-a-lifetime effort to bridge a gulf that separates the Alex who walks and talks in the world, from the one curled up snug inside, ruminating on whatever it is he ruminates on.