Other Worlds

I couldn’t be much closer to lunacy
than the view allowed, yet regardless
what the admission costs I swear I saw
sunlight under a leaf beneath a bench
on the packing shed floor.

To be sure it was only a momentary glimpse,
an instant’s capture of a daydream in a
library of nonsense, had I looked again,
regained my senses, dispelled the hallucination,
but I didn’t – accepted what it meant.

The halves of my brain were at war,
the afferent bent on doing what it could with
the information while the referent stood on
boring ceremony, analysed what it meant
and naturally refused to accept it.

It preordained another World beneath
the leaf, perhaps it was the portal through
which I would step into another place,
maybe somewhere else, but instanced
at that moment only in my afferent brain.

The rational half deduced the hole was too
small to be anything but enigmatic, and why
would it be on the floor? A wall made
much more sense, or a plasma screen,
or why not, damn it, a sodding door?

The debate was eclectic – it might have
gone on in this vein forever; can one half of a
brain really be mad and know it? Who gives
a shit anyway – and why are there always more
leaves than portals to alternate universes?
© I.D. Carswell