The nightmares are cinematic spins from my night-self,
left spinning in the morning.
The morning is 2am.
The morning is midnight.
The morning moves with me.
The labyrinth walls of sand lined streets,
confused in all their shifting and
so am I.
Another day came, I lost Fox
in the same neighborhood
and kicked my keys in the sewer,
scared and trembling
The dreams of dreaming are moonlight easy
The dreams of reality all terror.
The lighting in here is great for contemplation. I imagine a loud stillness filling my apartment, disrupted by the high pitch buzzing, blasting both my ears. It appears my physical form knows something before me and the party started the second I woke up wondering what I’ll do today. I didn’t get out of bed until eight so the sun was wasted and perhaps I’ll waste with it and feign nocturnal. My monstera must be overthinking too because its dying in its front row window. Maybe we’re both great at contemplating, and the lighting in here is great for contemplation.
I think I’m living now. I think you’d be proud of me, I was waiting all this time to tell someone about something I’m doing, and not another idea of something I think I might do. I’m so full of hobbies I forgot to start. I’m so full of heart and heavy delays. Turns out I was living all the time and got so stuck wondering when I was going to start that I started. Blindly, and staring eyeball wide at the secret sun burning down the road ahead. I’m pacing it. The clichés about slowing down. The irony of missing a memory when you’re only worried about what you might be remembered for. I remember a coyote blasting off in the Badlands at a prairie dog. I saw it all, branded in real-time, the coyote was living and I was small. A spectator in the hallway, watching another life living while I waited for mine.
It’s an unfair advantage.
It’s your brain in non-time, trying to remember how to forget.
The dream wasn’t real and you know it
in the dark of the room from
the dark of your heart. So you grasp
in the dark for dim reassurance, high on shaky post-midnight-oil vapors
lined up with the window blinds reflected in the mirror.
Flipping through the night channels
for proof that the dream
was a dream and not a memory,
knowing that as long as you feel the scene it becomes real from
remembering.
I sprawled horizontal on the back of my truck
cold and grey
come to life in the haze of expired rain
and I breathed the sun splattering through a few leaves
wavering in split screen
the edge of the trees should always glow
brightly against the cloud sky
spicy coals begging for breath and a minor disturbance. cold legs, a few feet away, and I'm way back believing it.
there could've been a smile out where I shined the light, there's a total loss of color twenty feet out.
there's a cricket in the mix. there's a dog in the dark somewhere. there's a couple other dogs in three directions screaming into the night.
the cricket is on my side. the dogs are days away.
Tonight
The only things real
Are the feelings stolen from a Tokyo subway
Stuck sweating in the liminal
On a dream of never coming back
And of always going home
I’ve been searching, fast,
for a couple words to unravel
the traveling I’ve done
to no place in time
to the spaces I like to forget
the car seat cracks in my mind
where all the pretzel salt collects
and the toothpicks tell
resurrection stories
I choked back an ugly cry
miles above the Pacific
between glasses of red wine
lost on a few hours
of foreign wandering
When I was a kid I did things for attention
When I was an adult I did things for attention too
Currently a former hypochondriac
Currently a spiral, gently
Now I listen to stories about myself
As if they’re memories
But the scenes are laid inside my brain
And if you emptied my head
You would see the stained glass
Reflections paint the walls
And know who I was
I was wild. On the sea, alone, by golden boat with high walls to peek past so your eyebrows are salted. Just enough to burn when the sweat wells up in the corners of your ocean eyes. There was a voice. There was a warning. A gold-skinned shark, swirled in orange-bronze that spoke back to the sun in rebellious little winks, screaming that god is a torpedo. The boat shook, and I splashed to the black-blue in hopeful atonement. I grasped the pine, and the pine grasped back hugging me to the floor to face the ether. I’m alone again, by golden boat, with the voice in my head that sometimes isn’t mine.
I have a lot of unfinished business
for someone with all this time on their hands.
Ghosts have unfinished business,
(and time)
and that’s how you become a ghost
and everyone knows it.
In this case all of my unfinished business is
really just unstarted business,
so I’m ahead of the ghost game,
and if I pile up hobbies I’ll never start now
then I’ll never be bored in the afterlife.
Future ghosts have it made.
Future me is going to take 200 years
to carve a first draft wooden spoon
that no one will ever use but everyone
will get a splinter from
until there’s no spoon left.
Future me is going to write
a 1000-year memoir
about being sub-par
at hobbies you’ve been doing for 1000 years.
It’s a self-help book for other ghosts and
a masterclass in mediocrity.
Future me is a ghost,
with too much ghost time.
What comes after ghost?
it’s the empty wine glass. it’s the ash trays edge in gold, and sacrificial tobacco. it’s the time tuned out, spent anywhere but here. it’s two decades of missed music, catching up on old moods. it’s being empty for the wrong reasons. it’s a false pursuit. it’s a flightless bird in a past life. it’s pure conversation. it’s a mid-august meteor shower, but it’s only an airplane again.
There are names in the trees, carved in.
Time and place under the canopy.
Brisk, the name of the leaves,
And the deep breath of the tree’s bass on the wind.
Names, old as the root, old as the heartwood
And the horizontal rot still gasping from the floor.
A chorus of initials carved since ’86,
So the tattoo repeats them in shallow marks
Through the gentle fingertips of admirers.
The old names of the forest live.
Weird is a state of mind, it’s important to wander to pass the time.
You’ve been asleep for years. The deep kind where you can’t tell your asleep anymore because you’re awake by all biological standards but according to the soft blacks high on your cheeks and the wall of disassociation prizes lining the inside of your eyes you’re a walking dream. Running it down right out of the movies in your head, right out of the darkness of your bed at 2am, right into the slow crawl 40-hour morning of your life. Right into the words you’ve begged to sing sparks electric in your body for a chorus worthy of Whitman’s refrain. Waiting on a call that wakes alive your bones from false ascetic. Along these lines is an edge of indifferent panic, sleepwalking til you slip, quietly crossing your fingers.