Listen to audio
“ Dream Merchants ”
– be ne’er what they seem –
The merchants of dream
Be ne’er what they seem,
Hence I caution beware
If you chance let them in,
Apathetic be a risky dare
For they’ll exploit within,
As dream merchants play
Thus to get neath the skin,
That will trap you to stay…
Of their dreams be alert
Tho you might judge fair,
They’ll distort and divert
As you indulge their spin,
What’s at stake be aware
You may find but chagrin,
As the pawn for their fare…
Ye soon find be soul bare
The while merchants grin,
From their deviant affair
Best not chance ye begin,
With dreams fated unfair,
Held by narcissistic strings…
Dream merchants shroud
That which flogs palaver,
Fake fine weather clouds
And what gullibles bear,
Their dreams of effusion
Suggest wouldst be real,
Tho but empty illusions
With an unfulfilled zeal,
When too late ye discover
Soul they managed to steal,
Cause of true dreams, to disappear!
© Jean-Jacques Fournier
Ode to Dreamers
of dedication to vivid imagination,
and in search of honesty…
Music, excerpt of Around Midnight, by Chet Baker
Art work, from Dream World images…
Poetry on a canapé 
Another great discussion that comes from your words of poetry. I have often wondered why humanity has a tendency to believe when there is no proof of validity. Perhaps it is because we want to believe the things that we believe. Remember the quote by Mark Twain, “The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.”
So true and so damaging, a misplaced word that can so easily and rapidly make or break a person’s life with little or no way of reversing the damage. Ever more so now in today’s electronic society of dizzying and irreparable speed. As in Dream Merchants that same evil applies to the ability of ruining life or rather the cherished aspect of dreaming with aspirations to live and feel, and reach out to attain a level of pleasure or happiness. Thus ever so that almighty word, can achieve great things but works as effectively to destroy as Mark Twain so precisely pointed out!
I agree, Jean-Jacques. When I was a child, my mother Frances, would remind me that once a word was spoken it couldn’t be taken back. It was said. I have kept that thought with me through he decades. Technology has given us immediate access to “word sharing.” May we speak our words wisely.
I loved watching your video of this poem. It reminded me so much of the Beat Generation. For me, the crux of your poem is that “dream” and “merchant” are two words that do not belong together. The merchants (in any number of different guises) prey upon the dreams of others for their own gain. The worst of it is that people are encouraged by the culture to “follow their dreams,” and so fall victim to those merchants who want to exploit them. It is heartbreaking to watch.
Amazing how one’s reflection can reach so many other people’s levels of interesting memories and life experiences. You are completely right about the words dreams and merchants not belonging together. They the merchants who metaphorically reflect the underbelly of so-called society, in professions of greed all well known and need not be elaborated upon. For they are the cultural beneficiaries you speak of, with their power acquired on the backs of they who eke out a living working for them. This is the society composed under the guise of democracy, conceived by the Greeks, adopted by the Romans, under the pretense, of the people, for the people and by the people. Tho it never specified that the people they spoke of were but the conceiving connivers, the then and continuing existing powerful people…the tradition of which has been bullishly kept intact to this day. Thus so my Dream Merchants, as you also describe being their raison d’être. I found your comments quite rewarding.