On Dreams

I was once a harvester of dreams, a hopeless fisher of surreality. I hung a dream-catcher, one the size of my palm if I stretched my fingers out, wrapped in blue and red strips of suede and draping colored feathers like tentacles of a deep sea squid, one I purchased in an apothecary shop in West Yellowstone that smelled of leather and tobacco and polished rocks, and tried to catch my dreams.
Years later, while strolling inquisitively through a Dalí exhibit at the Gallery At the White Unicorn in Prague’s Old Town Square, I found myself reconsidering my lost fascination with dreams. My dream-catcher, having once hung so gloriously from the ceiling above my slumber, had been bleached by morning sunlight, feathers ripped out, suede unraveling, taken down and stored somewhere too lonely for dreams to follow. It had been entirely unsuccessful in catching anything but dust and I recalled its presence with indignation as I soaked my eyes with images of the surreal, melted amorphous dream-friends, fantastical landscapes, mustaches curving at impossible angles—how did Dalí know?
Was it some dream-catcher he had procured from a more legitimate dealer rather than from some pharmacist for postcards and drugs for mountainmen? Perhaps the net in his own dream-catcher was knotted in some elaborate and inconceivable spiral so that each morning, he could stand on his bed and pick out the little dreams ensnared, fussy and biting at his fingertips so that he might use his blood as pigment for some deep red in depicting the persistence of his memory. Or perhaps it was because he was one of those lucid dreamers I had always been envious of.
“This is my hand. It looks normal. I am awake.”
I’d repeat this dozens of times, hundreds of times in a day, observing every possible millimeter of my hand in my conscious state so that I’d be prepared in a dream to find my hand did not look normal, and I could consciously take control of my unconscious adventures. But I forgot to look at my hand in dreams, as I had more psychedelic or frightening things to concern myself with, and finally began to forget the ritual of hand-observations in my woken state.
It perplexes me how he did it, how Dalí could grasp so firmly the notions of the dream state; how audacious to paint his own dreams while I might never even discover how one might look, struggling in my snare in the morning light.

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Knead

a fictitious scene for an otherwise nonfictitious character.

Pt. 1
He didn’t know why she was at the tent, perusing silk-screened posters in oranges, blues, silvers, of mystical creatures spelling obscure band names with their teeth or tentacles; moreover, he didn’t know why he was angry she was there, but he was.

She had not stopped by the bread shop that morning; granted, it was Saturday, and she rarely came by on weekends, but she hadn’t come the Friday or the Thursday or the entire week preceding either, asking, as she always did, for some home brewed warm beverage or chilled bottle of novelty soda and a slice of bread from the board, most often chocolate-chip pumpkin bread or the kind with peaches baked cozily inside. He liked the way she glanced furtively at the tattoo on his arm, cocking her head so slightly as he sliced the bread, trying to figure what the letters spelled. BROADHEAD in old typewriter kind of font: his last name. She didn’t know. He didn’t know she also had some Cherokee in her blood.

And he didn’t know why she had stopped coming into the shop.

She looked skinnier now, he thought, attributing her spindly appearance on this day to a lack in sustenance, a fuel he chose to believe could only consist of breadstuffs: chai tea and whole grain; not due to weeks of tension, fights with her mother, boxes of favorite things shipped out of state, as her sunken cheeks were truly due. Perhaps that was why he was angry as he stood amidst the hipster art tents in flour-dusted jeans, his palms burned from a faulty oven, his eyes stinging from sharing cigarettes in the back of the shop, in the parking garage, at the art festival gates: because, no matter how often or how little she’d come to the shop, how many years she’d stay in Salt Lake City, even if she ever figured the meaning of the letters on his bare forearm, he’d still never know. He knew as he watched her converse with the artist of the bizarre screens, laugh, and place a delicate hand on his forearm, that she’d never breach his perfect bread shop world; he didn’t understand why he had ever wanted her to.

Pt. 2
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Jackrabbits

The night was dark. If I had held my hand three inches from my eyes, I would not have seen its shape, my fingerprints. I curled into the darkness and the reeds and held my breath as the cop’s leather boots crunched past, as still as the jackrabbits before the headlights caught them. Even my ember did not emit a glow strong enough to betray me as I pressed the cigarette between my lips so tightly that I thought my teeth would bear through.
Jacklighting was not illegal in California; this was true, but trespassing was. Barry and the cousin, Carl, and I had trekked out from Long Beach on most weekends with the guns our fathers gave us in some heirloom ritual like the passing of a boy to a man, assuring our old men that we’d only pull the trigger on rabbits and only then in the desert where the only assholes we could hurt were ourselves.
My father thought he was doing right in sending his only son out of the city on weekends. Los Angeles would eat kids raw and Long Beach was the most ravenous for young blood. My weak heart and tender skin where the scar stretched across my chest could so easily be torn apart, giving my heart in to the madness of troublemaking. My father was lucky I was only hiding from the trouble of hunting rabbits on private territory. He was lucky I was no longer quarantined to the house, my genetically weakened heart unable to withstand the everyday plunders of the average child, so I was left to wreak havoc upon all visitors and fragile heirlooms that dared to enter 3838 Cedar Ave. But I was older now, and ready to move on to more dangerous trouble.
My younger heart would have burst by now, certainly, as it thumped in my chest while I crouched in the dark. The policeman would have found me eventually, bleeding from the inside out, but with my patched up heart, I was able to keep still, able to survive in silence, able even to slow and quiet my heartbeat as the cop’s pant leg grazed the skin on my face. I caught eye contact with Carl between squeezing tears from my eyes, tears from stifling painful laughter and fighting the sting of smoke-soaked eyes, my lips turning numb from pressure. Carl’s silhouette shook with laughter and my body trembled as the man returned to his trooper and slammed the metal door behind him. We were in the clear.
But I was blinded. Two fierce, bright lights blared into my sockets and I felt a searing pain piercing in my chest. I screamed, breaking my vow of silence to the reeds, as dozens or hundreds of jackrabbits sprung around me, stumbling over my writhing body as I tore the clothing from my chest. I clutched my hand to where my heart was supposed to be, hoping to keep it patched and keep me alive.
A burning ember rolled down my body and landed on the earth, losing its color and ending its faint, silky thread of smoke. I had not noticed the cigarette slip from my mouth like I had not noticed my comrades scamper away with the rabbits. The only thing I noticed was the cop’s flashlight shining in my eyes, his face burning down upon my contorted torso, his scraggly Western voice beating upon my ears. “Get up, son. Let’s get you fixed up and see the kind of trouble you’re in. You from the city?”

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another short poem

about the harp that grew
itself into a dance,
singing as air passes through,

ten notes at the same time.

If the boy had ten mouths
he’d use nine to sing
and one to keep quiet
when it’s night and time to listen,
ten-folded tongues
like creased paper airplanes

or plastic animal seams
to keep the internal organs

internal.

Swallows the harp instead
so that it sings inside,
hums with each breath,
wails with each gasp,
singing in ten ways for one mind.

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a short poem

about a longer commitment
to unrequitedness. Plastic ponies
clop along the edges of his shelves,
he checks a thesaurus
for the right words.

Marvel novels like pop-up books
lend their superheroes to offer
elocution,
batman brings some bravery.

The plastic animals he lined up
one-by-one
around the bathtub have migrated
from the corian and are encroaching
on his bedroom floor,

biting at his toes.
His harmonica grows legs
and dances across an imaginary
harpsichord, singing notes from each
of its ten orifices, sounds second
only to the synchronized hum

of model airplane motors, taped
on strings to the ceiling, flying
in perfect circles.

He’s making her a present
she never expected.

(dedicated to my soul mate, M.)

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Debris in Southern France

a belated poem scrambled for Bastille Day

remove sources of paddleboat friction
in hubble-dubbed August of visible light.
battalion exoplanet Fomalhaut chief

located the river and went missing,
too. Sarkozy urged a ceasefire
to recover two teens captured

in the planet hunt. Russia and France
host constellations in Nice while officials
withdraw a joint of gravitational dust.

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Man

Turning a peppermint candy over on his tongue,
the thirty-something’s lips curl up
at one edge at the thought of picking a fight,
his fingers already beginning to bleed.

Bloody knuckles:
his game
his style
his southern hospitality.

Finding it harder to be a gentleman,
he kicks a piano stool into the hall,
pounds out a haunted Tennessee farmhouse harmony.

Red: the blood of Detroit,
the southern sun,
the color he’d see if he were blind, too.

White: a pale man like Jack don’t belong nowhere.
a transparent ghost with mud on his shoes,
shoes without soles, Jack finding his soul:

it’s the Son of House.

Black: never the house band.
The south, the north, the reason he keeps on.

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Numeric

1.
You didn’t taste anything like metal,
it was the first thing I noticed upon pressing
my cages against your cages.

2.
I made a fold with my tongue, perfectly halved
like factory pears in condensed water,
saliva,
the eagle beak-shaped slit in a serpent’s tongue,

3.
Hissing a triumvirate of serpent deity whistles
through slots between clenched teeth,
cells where each day is marked by a small tick mark
of chalk dragged against calcitic ivory.

4.
On the fourth day, I strip you to metal elements,

5.
picking you apart with outgrown fingernails
of one hand,
each a tiny liberation of mine and your cages.

6.
A part, apart, particles of engraved metal
littering a counter,
missing screws
rolled away, the ones that turned six times
counterclockwise,
releasing from their swirled traps.

7.
Seven bones, two missing entrapments
(rolled away with two tiny clinks)
lost somewhere in a loop-hole
of the frequency theory,

8.
aching bones, rheumatoid reeds,
I can hear you cry
and there are too many days
in this week
to exist properly

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