I drag my feet in
my waking life, but I know this is an important year. At new year's sometime I dreamed about something floating in the sky. I didn't know if it was
the moon or the sun, but I couldn't take my eyes away; it was like a coin, like say it is the first day of 2001 and you already get a 2001 penny as change for cigarettes or coffee. I held it in my pocket for months.
I also knew which ones were sick, which ones I could help and which ones I would need to run away from, from dreams. And the other day it was a lucid one and it bored me and I couldn't think of anything to do but fly. So I flew. I ended up on the shore of a river, my hands on the shoulders of a child, even though I don't know any children. The moon was full and some of the beams were dancing in the ripples of the river, which, really, might have been a lake. I don't know any children and I can't have any and I don't even bleed with the moon anymore (because I got a shot, lucky me, not because I am sick), but this does not bother me as I get plenty of rivers and lunar cycles and ova and children the later I sleep. In sleep, you discover your drives and obsessions. And the later in the day you do it, provided you wear the right thing to bed, you feel like a rock star.
My mother was having lucid nightmares. Last year some time she dreamed I was dead.
There's a soft white rattle on my roof and the distant clatter of the classical piano music my next-door housemate plays. He did not like the white noise when he was in here because he had not heard it before. He said it came from nowhere. Another one was in my room saying he wanted to shut it off or run from it. They went to high school together and no longer speak. I have tried to begin to fathom why either of them came to me.
There's a fundamental not-rightness to sitting outside in the dark in a tank top; it is never this warm, or it is just that it is cold so long here that we don't know how summer is done, and are appalled by it. It does not come with warning as it does in other places; there is no getting used to the idea, because then you'd get used to other things, like striping your hair with molten gold to make it glow, or the other body in the bed, or the soft sound of God's voice singing you to sleep. It would be like eating cake for every morning's breakfast. Instead we are all so taken aback every year that sometimes those of us who can just sit and breathe, and sometimes then we drag the boombox on the porch and listen to Barry White and James Brown and it doesn't matter that all of the boys have proven themselves worthless dancers, because forget you not I also have sonofapreachermanandrockaroundtheclockanddickdaleandjesuspleaseplaythatsongagaini missed it in our communal little stack of CDs. Our favorite is movie soundtracks. Everybody knows you can leave your hat on and get up, get on the scene like a sex machine and where did you come from, angel? How did you know I needed you so badly? How did you know I'd give my heart gladly? Some hippies are playing frisbee with their dogs in the dark, in the park. It's gotten all perfect all over and we just can't fucking stand it.