my little one, i dreamt you. i loved your mother and you came to me in a dream. i saw you and heard your laughter. i saw you in a dream and suddenly you were here.
and you are everything i had imagined, you are everything i had hoped for. i dreamt you and you became real. i dreamt you and you came to me. you came to me and i became real too.
Category Archives: words
flux
the world moves like this, small little steps of intense focus and blip it is gone. it comes much easier than this. the man sits across from me and says delightedly, strippers come to me from miles abound. i note the intonation and refile through useless notes that turn me blind. my friend says, this is all very surreal and i reply, i know, we’re going to become a different class of people aren’t we? and in a matter of hours my three year old turns four and already she is unknown me, a mysterious animal with much charm and beauty and great potential for violence. these are exciting times, i tell my lover, i’m quite nervous. and she says, it’s all like a dream come true.
my skin is my own
i sputter about, half mad, half exhausted, a pinwheel run amok. between desire and disgust, i look in the mirror and finally recognize myself, i truly see myself. grizzly, barbaric, poetic soul in the trappings of a beast. my skin is is my own. there is no redemption, only the constant yearning for it, only the constant attempt. try again. fail again. try harder, fail harder.
sunbreak
the quality of the sun never lies: it always begins with the sun, a change in the angle, the quality of warmth. the sun is very clear when it will be ready. and as I sit in it as of for the very first time I am moved impossibly to tears. It feels as if i’ve been in the dark and cold for far too long.
patter
and in this there is the soft patter of the rain, an incessant thing that does not leave me alone. What a terrible comfort.
pearl-saliva-tree-fingers
i shovel a mouth
full of pearls, gritty and shiny
until my teeth crack
and my tongue flattens
out of over my jaw and the edges
push against the base and i would
choke with laughter if it wasn’t for my ribs
heaving and collapsing, an armadillo
of bones, and instead
i stretch backwards until i can see
behind me and all the world
suddenly makes trees weeping their limbs
into the mud and fingers sprout out like grass
writhing without palms and
she would have been born without a palm
and i cough out the pearls bloody and sticky
and the saliva drapes over my eyes
but nothing ever blurs, not even the fingernails, not even
the swirls of a thousand fingertips
to be simply blind
lax and cracking, like a painted petal falling apart at the seams. she needles and threads through another day while her spine unravels at her children’s fingertips. i sat solemnly on the porch waiting for the sun to bring some warmth to these bones. a dog across the street mangled the hedges and my neighbor lost his mind throwing cartons of cigarettes at it. these are the things dreams are made sour, she said, and rolled off the skin from her elbow down to her wrist like a glove, bloody and thick. between the veins and bones i saw a pulse and then could not see anymore. to be blind in the heat, i whispered, to be simply blind.
a perfect dream
the truth is i do not spend enough time with them, i am caught up in my own obsessions, in my willful emptying of space, place, in disappearing into the circuits, into the nonsense minutiae of rights management and authentications, the technology of disappearing or disappearing into technology. i fall asleep exhausted into my daughter’s arms, she grasps me through the night, and i sleep and sleep and find rest. my son, my daughter, my wife, all in my arms, a perfect dream
nursery fable
hanzel and gretel went up the hill to fetch a pail of humpty dumpty’s eggs but they came upon the house of the three bears where the first bowl of porridge was too hot and the second too cold and when they were about to eat the last which was just right grandma came down the stairs and they both looked at her and said, my grandma what big teeth you have and the wolf replied, all the better to eat you with! and tore off the grandmother disguise and chased throughout and out of the house where an old witch was stopping by and threw a poisoned apple into the wolf’s jaws and the wolf fell asleep just like that in the woods but the seven dwarfs found him and they were stricken with sorrow and hearing their cries the beast came along and kissed the wolf and suddenly the beast became a charming prince and the wolf awoke with such a fright that he ran off to hide in one of the three pigs’ homes.
sleep devotion
every dream has its consequence, some unforeseen cost that can not be accounted for. my mother traded her life for a man that promised her a new world in which he song abandoned her in. and now as her older siblings begin to endure the ravages of time, she weeps because she can only console them thousands of miles away. i gave up a life of words and letters for some sort of normalcy only to lament how precarious and tenuous that normalcy actual is. every dream has its price, if only it was matter of how much sleep could be devoted to it.