A/N: This story is pretty straightforward. Each chapter is a poem dealing with a person or concept in THE SANDMAN. The first is my shameless love poem to Morpheus…

Ode to the King of Dreams

He presides

Over a land of stories

Where fairy dust rides on the breeze of fancy

And the depths of horror stretch ever downward

I wonder

If he himself has a story

This stark, this mystical man with the eyes of night

The pale face, the immaculate expression, the hair like silk-covered wire

He has

Taken so many forms

The tribal lord the glaring fox the nineteenth-century dandy

The cat with the fiery gaze and fur that rippled like strings of midnight beneath the clouds

He lives

Always in the back of my mind

Softly sifting piano fingers touching and shaping

A barrage of half-written stories and half-claimed ideas

He is

Not always good to me

My king, o my beautiful king of dreams

But every moment he creates makes him dearer to me