More Dreams

We are driving around on a spontaneous get away weekend.  I think we are sad. We drive around neighborhoods to kill time, and we see a house for sale sign out in front. 2bed/2bth. It says its open for viewing. I say "lets just go in to see." We walk in the front door. The house is suburban with a plain white wood front door and a green yellowish lawn. Inside there is not much furniture. The floors are glowing golden wood, and the house is filled with morning light. " Hello" the owner says. He looks like he's only 19-21 years old. He's also wearing a black football jersey and it laying down on what looks like a hospital gurney. He's blond and stout and has gelled hair. He looks pathetic. "So you're an athlete by trade?"  i say. " Yeah..." he looks proud. I roll my eyes. We chat about the house and how he's buying a bigger house and he tells us to look around. You keep chatting to the D while I look around. The kitchen is blazing bright, with yellow tile and a beautiful wood island. Then there's a long hallway back to the bedrooms. First the bathroom. The shower looks like a giant blue mosaic urinal. quarter sized blues and greens and sea foam glass tiles up the wall to the ceiling. it was dizzying and beautiful. "i thought, i guess no baths...or showers?"i walk down the thin hallway some more. I see a beautiful bedroom which snakes into another long sunny room. and i think immediately " this is where i can write, this is where i can do yoga." i run back to you and the D and i say " this place has a great layout." the i notice the other bathroom behind him. this bathroom has even more tile and is bigger and brighter and is twinkling like a sea. There is a huge white tub. On one end the the bathroom, to the feet of the tub is a huge window. I look out it and literally hugging the house is a giant 300 meter swimming pool filled with older swimmers and babies and water aerobic moms. behind the pool is a giant green hill, and beyond that a brick downtown I think to myself: she can swim every morning and walk, she will be so happy, and I know that we could be both happy here. I'm coming running back to you and say "lets put in an offer". hes asking for too much: 323,000 but I don't care. I know were going to get it. You already have all the info we need. You even have a giant pink check on it that says 300,000. I am proud that we know what we are doing this time. everything is in order. we walk out of the place, and you say " we don't even know where we are!" I notice a giant sign behind the house that says: ORIGAMI. The town's name. My brother is there with us all of the sudden and says "OMG look at that park!" we didn't notice before, but across the street from the house on the other side from the pool there is another giant grassy park, with rolling hills and oaks and lakes and geese for as far as the eye can see. i am so happy i could die.

Love Nightmares

I was roaming a brick city with my girl and an old friend of mine. The friend isn’t real in my waking life; I had never met him before this dream.  But in the dream, we had a history, a knowing. He was a childhood friend that joined the army and went to Iraq. We didn’t feel comfortable around each other now that he was back, but there was an unsaid faith between us that our friendship was deeper than comfort.  I wanted this friend to know I was in love with Mariah. I wanted him to see what love is. When we got back to his apartment, the walls were half painted and most of his things were still in boxes. I knew when I walked in; it was going to take him a long time to let somewhere be home. He brought out a box of pottery. He said “ I made these out there, and somehow got them home in one piece.”  The bowls were crude and neutral toned, and I loved them. He may be broken, but he brought something home that was intact. I saw that these bowls were the things he was basing his sanity on.  In my mind I said, “ The moment is now!” I took one of the bowls into his dark carpeted bedroom and then took the ring out of my pocket and placed it in the bowl. I came out to the livingroom with no furniture and got down on my knees. I said,  “These bowls made it through a war because they were made from love, and I want our love to be that strong.” I lifted the bowl with the ring in it to her waist. She blushed and picked up the ring. The ring was the size of a bracelet.  He stood like stone, she didn’t know what to do so she held the ring between two fingers. And it flopped heavily between them.  I cringed at the sight of it. I had ordered the wrong thing. I tried to mold the thing in my hands to fit her finger. Everyone just stood around quietly and watched.

 ***

Last night I had a dream that I wanted to hold you.  We were with your friends at some cabin on a northern beach. It was a vacation or a party or a celebration—something with potlucks and balloons and people who haven’t seen each other in a while. You let me hold you for a minute; your wet bathing suit soaking into my shirt, the hot of my body and the cold of the ocean together was the best thing. Then you ran away into the steel cut waves.  I followed you.  But then you wanted to move over to the side of the beach where the waves were a blur of blue and green mountains; crushing the sand like a thousand drums. I told you I was afraid of waves like that. You swam out to the tall sheer walls, and I waded by the shore. I was pining for you, and watching you in the distance when I saw an older man floating face down in the water. I slushed against the waist deep green sea to get to him. I turned him over, and screamed, and screamed and dragged his body in slowly and sloppily.  He was so heavy with water and muscle. When I got him into the gray shore, the young men medics were there and they noticed he had a welt on the back of his leg. One of the boys said he had been licked by a poisonous fish. The poison rots parts of the body one by one and spreads with contact. IT IS VERY CONTAGEOUS! I saw that his legs were black and emerald, his ears and parts of his arms. They said, “You shouldn’t have touched him, you shouldn’t have touched him!” and I said “ Are you saying I was supposed to watch a man dying and turn away?” I looked down at my hands and two of my fingers were black and charred and ready to fall off.

***

I didn’t care about the creek. I had heard that it was getting polluted and that sketchy things were happening to people trying to speak out against the corporation dumping into the creek.  My boss, who was a student of mine earlier in the year, was there. The creek ran behind the college where we went.  She was trying to tell me how bad the creek was and I was ignoring most of it. Then she said, “ Just come to look at it.” I walked with her down the grassy hills to the creek bed. The creek was a puddle, muddy with trash and sheets of Styrofoam and giants objects damning its thin brittle waters. I felt sadness well up in me. I felt shame.  I felt called to action. I went home and drew up letters and speeches and maps. I was surrounded by paper with notes and sketches on them. I needed a disguise in order to keep anonymity from the big corporation. I drew up a superhero’s uniform. The next day I crashed a city meeting about the creek. I was wearing a painted motorcycle helmet. I started shouting over the speaker. I said, “ Denial will kill us.”

Manifest Reading Series 4.14.13

I read with the Darling Lindsey Boldt. I read with love in my heart and envy in my eyes.

*

Is the plasma in our blood the same plasma in stars? The non-solid, non-liquid snot that carries our milk and blood must be the same thing that holds the sun’s lava syrup to its arched back. It makes sense to me that the eyeball of starlight and human glue are cousins. 

Bernal Yoga Series Reading 5.4.13

I think I actually touched the wet butterfly of my heart when I read this one last night:

*

I want to see through the heart I want to see through the heart I want to see through my heart Please I want to see through my heart I want to see through this heart I want to see through this heart I want to see through this heart Please Please I want to see through this heart I want to see through this heart I want to see through this heart I want to see through this heart I want to see through this heart Please

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fIvMz1Q77s

\

hospital bed

*

The pink tattered blanket holds all the world’s sadness in its gruff. I want to hold his hand. I want to touch his face, his big bald forehead like an Easter’s egg. His hands are long and slender and bony like my grandmother’s. I wait for him to gain enough poise in his body to untuck his shaking arm out its dirty sheet and carry the trembling angel over to me. But then I leave and I am afraid to touch anything; even after I’ve washed, even after I’ve doused my hands with alcohol which makes them smell like a dentist, I’m afraid to touch my own face, I won’t pick up my sandwich.