The End of August: 2 Dreams, 3 Poems and Some Things in Between.

8/9  

Dream:

From the dirt road,  I steer a car sliding into the drive sideways. As it slows I leap from the seat. Hearing my daughter’s cries echo deep from a half-full pale, I pull her out. Her head disfigured, eyes wonky, I clean and dry her,  worried about chemicals. As I finish,  the smiling girl enters, shining, followed by her brother and mother. Puzzled, the three  look at me as I hold in my arms the lopsided doll from the bottom of the bucket –so still, fixed and unreal.

Journal Entry:

 I used to just hang out with people and not worry about how I presented myself or what we were doing. We just did things together. I have lost who I am in all this.

8/10

Journal Entry:

8:30 am

My alarm was going off. No, it was a phone call:

“This is Karen from the Early Learning Center.”

My sleepy mind thought of a place I had applied to volunteer, but it was my friend from Marysville and my former working life. I started to explain my interest in volunteering which had to do with working with speech pathologists.

“I’m sorry did I wake you up.”

“Yeah, but that’s alright.”

“I knew it might be a risk calling so early, but I am in the closet trying to figure some  this stuff out.”

I was glad it was the Karen I knew calling me from a closet trying to figure things out. It actually made sense.

8/11

Journal Entry:

I am feeling so let down and patronized. Should I feel flattered? I should make what I want of the position.

8/14

Dream:

I was looking at a giant Ladybug Magazine with someone. Then I was riding a motorized tricycle through a dark neighborhood full of shadowy dangers. My friend’s dad opened the sliding glass door and I drove right into the house.

8/22

If I write

and write like a fiend

all I have seen, heard and done,

Leave not a crumb unfound,

All bound into the manuscript

Of greedy contemplation.

8/25

Multicellular Life

 

Every cell in my body cries out with a separate life.

How am I one being?

Am I a consensus of all these voices,

a conglomeration of the loudest calls?

I make decisions , but most of that process is subterranean

complex beyond my comprehension,

The “I” I use

a small part of a system

full of contradictions.

How to walk a narrow path

With such ballast to manage?

How to remain true to any values

when there are all these

competing clamorous mouths

that cry out from within to be fed?

 

Window

 

Jumping into a precarious situation

Balanced by creativity and action,

Leads to

Rough cream drapes

Two sticky kisses

Against lowered venetian blinds

2011 in review: Dreams in Early August

“You think people are silly to believe in ghosts?” An old man had asked Fred Foley a long time ago. “You should hear some of the things that ghosts believe in!”

R.A. Lafferty, Fourth Mansions

8/3

Characters from a Dream in Search of a Story

The path forward seems wide enough to drive a truck through. It is my job to keep it open and drive forward. I will do this by writing.

The path forward seems wide enough to drive a truck through. It is my job to keep it open and drive forward. I will do this by writing.

Fenton, Patch, Braz, and Sterling, high school boys are arrayed in a loose circle between two parked cars in a 7/11 parking lot in Mazoula, Montana on a short sleeve night in August.

“Mebbe we should jes’ head out,” Fenton says.

“Where to?” Patch asks glancing at Fenton. “We could go anywhere . . .”

I lost them as I turn the page they are slow to cross the divide, frozen in the Mazoula summer night no particular year somewhere in the twentieth century before cell phones and facebook, white t-shirts ablaze with cigarette packs rolled at the shoulder, above well worked biceps bulge as they bring the orange-red glow up to hungry faces. Slouching lips suck in hot smoke and exhale with practiced cool into the fluorescent air. Which one leans on the ’67 Charger, metal flake lime green with a spoiler and scoop? That would be Braz. Doesn’t speak much.  Always thinking, he Reads Kafka and Kerouac. The others feed off of his ideas like lamprey in a shark’s mouth.

“Man, we should blow this slow stretch of highway,” He says quietly almost mumbling. “I got some dough.”

The other three look up startled, but not showing much. Patch, the usual storyteller, strangely silent, waiting as if the night held dangerous creatures ready to pounce at the sound of his usual twangy patter.

Inside the 7/11 ½ gallon cartons of low fat milk line the dairy case visible above the top shelf the chip aisle, bright bulging bags of Doritos. Sterling taps a rhythm on the sparkling hood of the charger and whistles aimlessly searching for a foothold on a song he knows. He was in a band for a while, played any instrument he picked up easily, but could not stick with anything long enough to master it.

A lone shopper pauses before the line of milk nervously glances at the boys as Fenton leans back against a red Pinto and takes another drag, tilted tensely, suddenly pacing off into the blank endless dark beyond the glare. He comes back grinning.

“Well, where to boys? I’ll be damned if I’m gonna hang out in this ghost town one more night. I’d rather be jailed, I swear!”

The place where rivers flow into the ocean, delta wetlands with mountains, caves, tidelands, forest and desert formed into mythic landscapes in Fenton’s mind. The mountain valleys and plains of Montana had stretched his days thin. He wanted warm mud and a tide. He had been to the ocean, the pacific, Long Beach in Washington. He saw the waves piling and sprawling, the hissing whoosh and roar and the endless horizon. He had only been there once, but it stayed with him like a magnet drawing; every now and then he noticed it.

8/5

Hard Line

Terrorists fill the woods. Tall graceful trees sway without wind because thousands of terrorists move through the woods.

 I draw Omar (Jimmy Smits) aside and say, “You would never use the nuclear option?”

He says, “I can’t rule that out. The trees are swaying with them. They are armed, 100,000 maybe. How many soldiers would it take.”

The cocktail party conversation hushes and heads turn in horror at his words.

“You have to negotiate,” I say.

“I don’t think they will negotiate,” he says. “They seem ready to die.”

“But you can use conventional weapons at least.”

“We have them in a confined space and could eradicate them to a man,” he insists. “We could evacuate the area so that a tactical strike would affect only a small area.”

“Why not contain them and starve them out? Surround and defend.”

“Loss of life on our side would be brutal.”

“Who are these militants and what do they want?”

“They want us to worship as they do. They want to make the world follow their laws.”

“There is no negotiating with that? What if we give them a place to live where they can do as they wish?”

“They have no idea of compromise. It is all or nothing. I intend it to be nothing rather than all.”

Another Spam Poem

Image via Wikipedia

A chunk of spam sliced and arranged:

 

 

A  Drift

Right!

human speeches memorial eyes

room

and ride 

big  Inner-system sound

   a round rowdy

should always not forget

currently glowing leader

ship,

 speaking in one zone boat,

brother!

Summer Thoughts and Dreams: July 2010

Image by ahisgett via Flickr

Journal Entry:

7/2

Human contact has always been a mixed experience for me. I am often left with the feeling that I should’ve done something differently or I should be different somehow. At my last job I came as close as I come to feeling comfortable in a group of people until it all vanished. Since then it has been so easy for me to slide back into my old solitary habits.

A wolf does not assess his performance in a hunt. Wolves do not judge other wolves on their skill. They live together, or not, and do what needs to be done. The proof is in survival. They may make adjustments like learning to avoid the hooves of fleeing deer. They test each others’ strength and resolve as pups and in courtship, but I don’t think wolves ever have the thought I am a great hunter or He is lousy at this.

How does one become a great artist or engineer or doctor. If Picasso didn’t become a great artist what else would he be? Even if he was untrained and stuck in a struggle to survive, he would have to create something original. Frank Lloyd Wright would have built something even if he never became an architect.

So who am I at my core? What is my thing? Have I found it yet? I am sure it is in here somewhere I just have to keep digging stuff out of the pile and throwing it out there.

Dreams :

7/7

There were false gods in the house. My friend, Mark, was there too. So we all decided to go.  A group of children and some adults walked out into the street as a parade was going by. The children followed me into the crowd and were lost almost immediately. We found them later in an isolated spot among the trees singing. They had all changed into different forms so we had to look carefully to identify them.

Is it good to live inside a dream? Where the bland is often horrifying and the outlandish accepted as normal? An intelligent alien might think we were living in a dream about hell as we cook our planet while watch empty celebrities make a mockery of their lives.

7/8

I stand on an immense solid block of dark grey rock carved out of a cavern that surrounds me a thousand feet on all sides. I look over the edge, down 300 feet of sheer rock, to the floor of the cavern. My cell phone rings. A friends voice comes through vaguely through the hiss of static.

“They are trying to replace me! Help!” she screams.

I look back down and see that she is running the cavern floor pursued by an exact copy of herself.

Dream Poem:

7/9

The Other Side of  The Year

 

In the frosted megalithic city of Christmas,

snow like sand pushed across the flat stone

serpentine patterns of white emerge and vanish

We huddle, barefoot, in an intersection.

 Immense windowless monuments line

the streets in all directions

into the distance.

I draw my cloak tighter to keep out

the clawing fingers of wind.

 

7/13

100 cars crash in a pile. Workers pick up body parts– one man carries a transparent face like a mask casually in his swinging hand. I take some pills and lay down on a lawn. Some people stop to see if I am alright. One woman walks next to a small black animal like an otter; smooth and sleek, It reminds of our dog, Charlie.

Another Dream Poem

7/14

The Story of Larry Troll

 

Peaches fall from the moon and

diabolical razor tarts.

The attic stairs rebound.

My heart raves speed in numbers,

twice the gears–

bounding up and down the windmill,

a sailing snail curling,

unfurling in beastly breath.

drawing letters to make pictures of words,

stone steps chiseled roughly

E O U

I walk up the ever steepening mountainside.

Soon I will need handles to grip

with dog licked fingers on frozen rungs.

7/31

In a city on a hill by a river in Mexico, I go to a large church to visit some people I know, but the service is in progress when I arrive. After a while, people start to come out. I find the people I know (mostly old women in black lace) and lead them down to the basement where there are some things I had left. We all sit down in a large room and eat pie. I am thinking I have to catch a bus as I am eating. I have to get home which is a hundred miles away, and I don’t want to walk. I go down more stairs and find the woman I was most looking for. She is thin and frail. I help her out of the church and we start walking out of the city. Eventually, she is so weak I must carry her. We enter a small town in a flat valley, but we still have far to go. There is a gang of scruffy men who do not like us. As we walk past them I hear them making plans to harass us. Me and my woman quickly run to a warehouse on the edge of town that looks empty. Inside we find a woman named Pilar and her two children sleeping. My woman’s lawyer joins us to draw up a contract so that we can share the warehouse and protect each other from the gang.

June 2011: A Month That Will Live In Infamy (at least for me).

June pretty much sucked all the way through. On the first I got a speeding ticket in the last 5 miles of my sixty mile commute. The following Monday I discovered that my tire was flat at 6:00 am as I headed to work; I spent most of my day dealing with that. That Friday I was unexpectedly and very rudely dismissed from my job. I battled depression and an intestinal infection with mixed results throughout the month. By the end of June I was ready to find a new career path, but I realized I had almost no transferable skills of any value. I felt hopeless and in need of some inspiration. It was cloudy almost every day as well. All in all one of the worst months of my life, and hopefully for a long time to come.

June Poem:

To Do List

Desire toward fulfillment

and purple dye

Drop all pretense

Make obsessions that work

Dump Run

June Dreams:

6/17 

A charismatic and athletic white male friend, with bright winning smile, is in a relationship with a short  middle-aged latina, with long black hair and still shapely body. She runs with him and can’t keep up, though she tries hard. She breathes hard and her face is flushed as she pumps her arms and her small legs move awkwardly because she wears platform shoes and tight pants. She falls behind but he doesn’t slow down.

“You should take it easy on her; she’s 55 you know,” I told him.

He looks back at her and smiles a smile of  love and acceptance as she struggles to catch up.

6/30

A little girl in a white nightgown appears as I approach. She wakes up in mid-sentence talking about her 2 kittens in as if she has a PhD in Kittenology, specific to the cuteness of her kittens.

The house across the street looks abandoned and looms mysteriously. Its blank suburbanness telling about some dark secret inside. It is a house that I lived across the street from when I was 9 years old. The family left suddenly leaving all kinds of strange paper piled and scattered about inside.

That same year a dog from down the street killed our cat as my brother, sister and I watched. That dogs owner was attacked by a cat and developed cat-scratch fever and died– some bizarre cycle of cosmic retribution or karmic ripple. What had we done to enter into to its flow? Maybe the scientific torture we wreaked on the ant colonies in our yard the previous summer.