4.27.24
Not many dreams but more dreamy realities, which left me thinking many times this week about the sweetness of happiness after the bitter punches of struggle. So in a rare moment of self-congratulation, I’m patting myself on the back for all I've endured — sexual, verbal, and emotional abuse; a stretch of homelessness; workplace sexism; rejection after rejection; and, so on — to be sitting in the sun today, feeling lucky of all things, with a head full of cliché affirmations. And so, despite my lifelong, preternatural understanding of ephemerality, I hereby declare: I have always been, and always will be, in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing. <3
4.20.24
Three girls in straw bonnets flank a horse that pulls a wagon transporting a closed casket. The girls are tearless in blue dresses, freckles sprinkle their noses. The horse is a dear friend, the fourth member of their cohort.
The day is sunny, warm. There are no plains, no buildings, no mountains, no landscape. The scene unfolds with Brechtian sparseness. There aren't any views of an ocean, but it’s known an ocean is close by, furthermore, the tide is on its way out. As the water recedes, it pulls base feelings from the guts of the three girls and the onlookers dressed in black who’ve gathered together to watch the procession go by; the receding ocean leaves everyone emptied and lighter, and confused by the weight of sudden absence.
If there is judgement, it is indiscernible, too insignificant to be felt. And if there is pain, it is consumptive, essentially commonplace and effectively null — a numbing agent that allows the scene to progress with a tranquil slowness that stretches outward through a featureless expanse and entombs an unavoidable solemnity with grace and an encompassing white light.
4.13.24
While dressed in my finest wool tunic and living deep underground, I was forced to choose between stopping an oncoming flood or freeing an animal from its cage. I choose to free the animal.
It was a large white tiger with a Fu Manchu and bushy brows that outlined its cheeks with face-framing tendrils. The cage was small, rancid, windowless, and when it lifted to free the tiger, the tiger stretched, stood upright, towered over me, and nuzzled my neck like a secure and satisfied horse, then took off running through a stone arch doorway.
Water seeped in through cracks in the walls and rained on us through overhead light fixtures. The underground hallways stayed lit long after the flood waters poured in; the orange light from sconces flickered on the water and surrounded us in a sea of dancing gold.
People panicked. There was much screaming and running, many worried faces. Everyone wore crimson wool tunics — some had gold markings, others had silver, but most were simply crimson with black piping.
We all seemed to regret something or miss something; our fears and sorrows aligned. Whether anyone drowned remains unknown.
What I remember last was running up wide, white stairs like the marble steps to Bates Hall half expecting to see you at the top waiting to share a joke with me. But I knew very well you wouldn't be there and all I'd see would be the WWII propaganda posters and handsomely dressed Gatsby talking about his evolutionary biology themed poetry.
I kept running and eventually found a door.
3.30.24
People live in homes the size of palaces and grow exotic plants that bear neon fruits they feed to pigs and goats they tether to their exterior palace walls; the animals laze around moats.
“Moats are a stable water source,” the gardener tells me. He is a man in his eighties with the acuity of a border collie. In the distance a pen rolls off a desk, he runs to catch it, and when he returns he is younger and concerned with the pH level of the largest palace's moat. He puts on green waders and blue rubber gloves and rushes into the water while talking about credit unions. He asks, "What is the value of a thing?"
People leave their palaces and gather around the moat to watch the young (formerly old) gardener collect soil and water samples. His wading disrupts the still water and noxious smells escape. Wafts of foul, sticky cecal droppings and septic algal stench permeate the air along with the aural cicada rattling of people chit-chit-chattering. The youthful gardener loses his bearings and begins to cry. In between sobs he asks for privacy. The people detest this but grant him his request and return to their palaces; burn-bridged spiteful by their expulsion, they slam doors and draw curtains and call each other on the phone to gossip well into the night about the age defying gardener's dubious "crocodile tears" charade.
It begins to rain and the gardener's youth begins to fade, soon he is old again, older than before, broken somehow, as if he's lost or gained an unnameable, questionable sense. "Love is the crux of lost mankind," he says to the sky. "You drip with it or you stand rigid." His body coils, droops invertebrate, then slips underwater where it remains out of sight like an elusive, recondite nymph.
3.23.24
I am warm in the Amazon sucking milk from a coconut, then abruptly walking down a city street in winter at night. Pink dolphins drape over icy snow mounds, freezing rain gathers in giant water lily cups, jagged-toothed caiman walk the street with me, a Jesus Christ lizard runs frantically by.
Up and down the street, elixirs are sold on the cheap in colored glass vials etched with images of human tongues, hands, and hearts. The elixirs are made by smocked artisans who test their concoctions on the very ill, the criminally insane, the indigent. After taking an elixir, some people recover and are forever free of their affliction, notably greed, poverty, and pain. Others only get worse. The elixirs induce perpetual full-bodied rocking at torturous speeds — violently fast or imperceptibly slow. The afflicted are branded 'Forever Invalids' and shut away in cold, unfurnished rooms save for padded rocking chairs that are bolted to the floor in drab buildings the recently un-afflicted walk by on route to the bakery, where they'll fill a pink box with confections to enjoy after a home cooked meal of roasted chicken and fingerling potatoes served in a white wine and garlic, shallot sauce. Perhaps they will sit by a fire.
The worlds blend again and now I am inside the kitchen in the dark looking out the window at the leaves blowing across the street, with the leaves blow the soiled paper plates from Yuri’s Thanksgiving barbecue. I have seen this scene before. How much of a life is spent reliving? How much is spent imagining?
You’re here now and we are present. I like the cold patter of snow. I like the dirt-y smell of your coat. I like when you come in from outside. I like the winter on you. We sit wrapped in kaleidoscopic scenes of strip malls and tender spots where everyone has a word for me. You pull the wool and the cotton and soft down over our heads. We are safe beneath the weight of your blankets.
3.16.24
Quietus-induced dreams of office parks, cubicles, grey, beige, drones, clones, filing cabinets securing paperwork for my safety (show me fear then sell me home security), hundreds of text messages, thousands of emails, and uncertain waking hours tenuously anchored by brown boots.
3.9.24
It has started to bleed together. The oppression and the disdain, the ill-conceived and ill-informed perceptions, the dialogue, the weighted feeling and claustrophobia, the blocked passages, all blended and spitting out the demands of a brutish cohort protective of a power they pretend to need, and smug women believing their agendas hidden, their planned deceptions ingenuous confusions. Deciphering the difference between imaginary worlds and living history is now dependent on instinct and the willingness to slip into unreality and abandon the concept of "known".
Trapped in a restaurant with house music jamming on about a retro, played out scene — sequins and bottle service, bob cuts, and roofies. Girls saying they’re the best, then crying. Boys saying they got this, then beating. Beating hair jerk-offs, beating their girl parts. All sorts of screaming now.
I wait at the bus stop. The Tamale Lady sits beside me. She can’t unfold the corn husk. I help her and she nods, then I watch her eating corn mess. Your grace sustains me like effusive honeysuckle nectar.
His big foot lover dives into the shallow end and comes up bloody. He's embarrassed at the sight of her broken teeth, by the hot blood pouring down her chin and pooling around her enormous feet. I am appalled and so is she but she thinks she’s won something. She smiles, taunts me, and swallows his conceit but is not satisfied, and it is then she knows she has lost, suddenly she’s twisted, wants her money back. One evening she takes out a pair of kitchen shears and stabs him in the chest; he crumples, shakes, spurts, tries to erase her. Clouds gather around her and she disappears.
Beside the barn on the stretch of grass outside the paddock, there is quiet. Tall grasses grow from sloped roof gutters. Rabbits eat clover. Swallows dive expertly — forked tails, orange bellies, luminescent feathers, the swooping alacrity of low-flying bats.
Outside my house of glass come the tigers. I stand inside and watch them running at full speed up the hill toward the house at dusk. When they are a few feet from the glass they lunge, airborne, all four paws off the ground, and slam headfirst into the glass wall that does not shatter or crack, nor does the impact of skull on glass faze any tiger.
A large Bengal tiger looks at me with glowing eyes symmetrically set in an orange face contoured in white and black. I imagine throwing my arms around its neck, burying my face in its fur, then it lopes away, back down the hill to chase the horses and deer out of the woods, through wild fields of rising fog where the brutish cohort waits to catch an animal and call it prey, and the women sharpen knives with which to skin it and giggle "I love you, you brilliant thing" while deriding its beauty, its fragility, the weakness of its trust, of moving slow enough to see.
2.28.24
Getting a jump on dreamreporting because I'm going on vacation :)
Nothing too notable this week, just a naked man with a rat tail lounging on a wooden bar bench; he was lonely, a pariah, women laughed at him. Also dreamt solitary dreams of smoking cigarettes in ornate basements with grand pianos, French doors, fireplaces, and bathrooms stocked with fine lotions. I had one very lucid dream through an Eastern European landscape. It was incredible. Everything was free. I did a lot of travel, walked everywhere. But overall, it was an insomnia week.
.
However, I enjoyed some learning and relearning: 1) sea lice exist; 2) some buoys transmit data; 3) certain books are popular for good reason (eg., The Overstory); 4) I love fog; 5) "More Human than Human" is a perfect highway driving song; 6) asking for help is a pathway to betterment; 7) my dog is very important; and, 8) Snoop gets hockey
I love you. Dream big <3
2.24.24
The screaming came from within. And there was a lot of it. And it was nonstop. It was understood and openly discussed, the type of conversation people had over dinner, but still generally disliked. People were uncomfortable with the thought of going next, yet understood and accepted that it could, at any moment, be their turn. They worried and worried openly, but they didn’t defy or reject. There were no protests, no martyrs, no rebellions, no underground networks of organized dissent.
People wondered more than they worried. They wondered about the discomfort that they could, at any moment, face. What would it be like? It had been leaked, by the man who used to control the front gate, that a lot of attention was paid to the extremities, to pulling the hands and pulling the feet, to popping shoulders out of sockets and dislocating hips, and in between the pulling and popping and dislocating, the body was flipped from supine to prone and back again, like an over grilled sausage, until eventually, the body lay still. But it was also a wonder how the man who used to control the front gate could know such things, after all, he was outside, and the screaming came from within. Surely, he was letting his imagination spin.
People wondered what was the use. They thought it barbaric, this keeping of secrets and impending pain. But they understood and openly discussed: it was for their safety, it was designed to protect them. Perhaps what bothered people the most was the colorless building. A cement gray fortress that occupied an entire city block — imposing yet ignorable, enormous yet forgettable; the looming gnaw of lifeless. If it were aesthetically pleasing, perhaps painted with murals or draped in ivy, or if bougainvillea climbed up its sides and covered the cement in paper flowers, perhaps then it wouldn’t bother people so much. But then again, that would defeat the purpose, and people knew this, so the wondering of aesthetics was a juvenile conversation people didn’t have past the age of 30.
The night before my number was called, my pillow turned hard and my arms kept lifting up and lowering down, repeatedly, like I was raising my hand and immediately putting it down. Right hand raised, down. Left hand raised, down. This happened throughout the night. I couldn’t get any rest. I tossed and turned. I beat the hard pillow to fluff it up, but it only got harder, flatter, until eventually it became a single sheet of paper. The crumpling noise beneath my head was too much. I reached for the paper to throw it on the floor but moved too quickly and gave myself a vicious paper cut that slit my cheek in two. I thought of crying but didn’t see the use. Somehow the night passed and in the morning I received the news: it was my turn, my number was up. I thought of running, but where to? I thought of begging, but who to beg? I thought of hiding, but how? Everything was known, all locations tracked. So, like everyone who came before and like everyone who’d come after, I gave up the ghost.
On my walk to the colorless building full of screams and secrecy, I had a dream within a dream. All I looked upon turned to light. I felt my heart rise inside me, buoyant, as free as a helium balloon set loose in the sky; I floated. My hair blew in wisps across my face. My body, supported by tufted clouds, blew this way and that in vibrating wind. My skin, warmed by the light I approached, shone brilliantly, until in time and then forever, I was visible no more, and my every utterance adopted the abrupt silence of an extinguished, yet once raging, fire.
2.17.24
Asleep (in dreams I’m told are nightmares), your sweetness is saccharine and saturated; you’re a travel agent in a bright blue suit hawking all-inclusive Disney packages wrapped in neon cellophane. But awake (when you’re beside me or beneath me or on top of me or just nearby), your sweetness is savory and long-sought; you’re a heart-shaped habanero honey pizza after a winter storm's turned the world to wrought.
2.10.24
Derrick sucks ketchup from packets and sits cross-legged beside me at the kitchen table. He keeps trying to speak but no words come out, only ketchup spit. The toad woman without a neck emerges from the hallway, her eyes bulge like golfballs. She rattles, croaks, makes noise. Derrick asks about Moses and Gaspar, wonders if they are dogs. I tell him dogs would never. They are cats or they are demons. The toad woman crouches on the ground and plays sexy with a spatula the width of her tongue. She disturbs me. I think of paste. I leave the kitchen for the porch and stand on the steps leading to the backyard. The arborvitae towers over me. A parade goes by led by the brass-bangled, raccoon woman who makes such a racket with her smile; her ego is her noise, her vanity her cheer. She disturbs me, too. I wonder: Why is everyone so loud? I find silence in a cave. The tide is out. There are drawings on the wall. Rock furniture. Tree stump tables. Slate plates. I am quiet. Spirit is quiet. You are loud. I am blue. Spirit is blue. You are red. I am deep. Spirit is deep. You are shallow. I am everywhere, always. Spirit is everywhere, always. You are nowhere, never.
2.3.24
So I says to the guy,
“Your minute phrasing
Like a pallbearer’s box
Piled on top, like loving, in Boston —
Hip sore and too hot —
Beats the laughter at the viewing;
Painful, how apologetics cry.”
And he says,
“There we have it,
Meggie speaks rotten.
Finally, sincere applause.”
1.27.24
She went by Manhattan but her name was Lily. She wore all black. Her hair was cut short and also black. She had two tattoos — a circle on her right hand, an X on her left hand. She wore thick black glasses and spoke softly and precisely, the enunciation of a stage actress. She disliked when people said “cigarette butts.” “Just call them cigarettes,” she’d say. Butts, butts, butts, the word repulsed her. She rolled her eyes, crossed her arms, hugged her chest tightly. She wore black oxfords and black blazers. She did not suffer fools wisely. She lamented. She was tortured, took it out on us. She wrote about fabrics rubbing against each other — the dissonance of pilled silk rubbing against starched denim; she hated that. She hated chenille on corduroy the most. She carried on about an evening subway ride, about the sickness in her gut, worried about her next drink, how she needed it, how the subway never went fast enough. She stomped her feet and kicked the chair back in front of her. She wanted vodka and she wanted it now. She was sickened by frailty. She talked about her lovers. She loved women best. She taught us how to touch them. She named her women Cheyenne and Dixie but their names were Jennifer and Becky. She dreamt of stormy oceans, abandoned city streets at night, inner city trash. She didn’t believe in viable communities. She kept to herself, ate sparingly, slept on a mattress on the floor in a one-room apartment with a faulty lock and a broken toilet bowl. She shat in a bucket and peed in the shower. She did not care if anyone liked her. She kept a kerosene lamp and a box of matches by her bed, she liked the drama of it. She was opposed to being photographed and eventually she opposed language, so she stopped talking, said not a word and disappeared quite silently. Refusing to be seen, refusing to speak, she shrank into the world of shades where daylight cannot stretch.
1.20.24
No dreams this week, too much insomnia. But I "ice skated" HORSES in the arena underneath a Pippi Longstocking's mom-styled sun... that was dreamy <3
Photo cred: Lindsey Farm :)
1.13.24
A woman wearing black lace up boots stands before a suburban pharmacy greeting card rack. She leads us out back to a forest, through stripped trees vacant and worn as tattered flagpole kindling; I’m not sure why or if I believe in her or if I have use for whys and beliefs anymore. It is like being a flame. Growth in destruction, growth indiscriminate, growth til I cannot breathe — Imprinted, Inherited Mantra.
There is a person making movies. Dark, slouching, they are a dust bunny off in the corner — they want to be seen as who we are, but they are stuffy, their face powder makes me sneeze. They pose, and you, of course, are enamored; even here, attention is your everything. You perform your act and I take off running.
I am a pocketful of limitless without shoes on; me, my only death; me, barefoot running on forest debris — damp, decomposing leaves shift underfoot, sticks switch slashes across my soles, occasionally the pointed edges of rocks puncture my skin and raised tree roots send me tumbling. All throughout are flashes of paradise, life’s ecstasies, the usual gimmicks — soft smiles, huddled winters, August sunsets, subway cars painted orange and pink, October rosebuds, silver glints on lawn chairs, biking by the river (no hands, no shirt, no eyes), the grit of sand on our scalps, floating in salt water, sinking through fresh water, suspended fears temporarily not a part of us.
Fry two fish tonight, let’s eat by candlelight, let’s wear our special dress, let’s decide on this — a loss or a draw?
1.6.24
I add to your mythos in an oil drum. Half a moon, no clouds. Underneath us, in the basement, there's a tunnel, cogs turn and pistons churn; they move without lubrication, pumping production out to sea. What a racket.
If I lived in Victorian England, I’d be home by now, I keep thinking.
The world is dark blue, grey, and dreary; always a mist rises from the streets — at night it is spectacular, during the day it is particulate. I am torn between the need for manic light and the eerie dark of blue. I want footsteps and running and sneaking and pawing. I want exposure and sin.
The woman with the perfect teeth and red boa says, “You are the girl without a feather in her cap.” And I tell her, “Yes.” My heart races. I think for a moment I have fooled her. “Come on,” she laughs. Faceless shapes surround her, they wear torn suit jackets, their hair is sparse, greasy, they emit foul smells masked by saccharine lotions; I am neither attracted nor repelled, their poverty impresses me.
I am a green emanation, I have decided. I have also decided to board a ship; the moon is bright enough for travel. I book a porthole seat. My dress is grey with velvet piping, my hat stacked with dark roses. I yearn and know it's growth.
If I lived in Victorian England, I’d be home by now, I keep thinking.