Matt, I love how the poems divides the nightmares between night, S1, and morning, in S2. And I love how the biblical myth serves as the foundation of all the cascading images. I, personally, read the nightmares as a post-intervention state assailing someone in a hallucinatory state of detoxification. But, really, such suffering is archetypal no matter what its cause, and I love how such suffering brutally interrogates its avatar, Daniel, challenging him, tearing at him, re-imagining his endurance, his beasts, his den. Paradoxically, such non-literal diversions from a mythic tale prove its vitality. I guess when I first read this, quickly, I sensed the obscurity that some will no doubt find here. But coming back more attentively now, it seems clear as a bell.
Those last two lines are an astounding dénouement.
And, as usual, each of your poems is an utterly unique creation.
Nemo
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