I seem to have woken up somewhere else. When I was a child, a serious child, I dreamt (not dreamt, thought) of other places. An orphanage a garret room Mrs. Squirrel's treehouse a governess that little tin haunted house whose doors only opened (creak) with a penny. Half magic. I went to bed and thought (not thought, dreamt) of men like angels like the Rembrandt forms in a book that lay on the coffee table in a room to be skirted, men who tended to me like a woman yet as a girl I wouldn't know how to write it but I did. I did write it on a slip of paper a lined diary my beautiful dream and woke up to my mother with the slip of paper the turn of her head at the stove at the toaster (she offered always to to eat the burnt piece) down (she looked down) at me a small child and said I didn't like your dream. It wasn't nice. Shame has a beginning and it's what's scraped off what's burnt where you woke and what's left behind is where you slept and I seem to have woken up somewhere else. There are men here. They watch cars race around men jumping to put balls into hoops bash one another (the word tackle) they talk diamonds and serves and swings and win and lose and their hands light up (they hold themselves in their hands, always themselves). Where their hands might have held poetry or talk, a pen (I dreamt) now only a box of light in a palm that takes them elsewhere and this is where I've woken up. 

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

Virginia Woolf