In the Room Where You Sleep

In The Room Where You Sleep (live video version)


Not really sure what this is all about, but I think it's delightful. I believe that's Ryan Gosling at the piano.

A Week Before Christmas

i.
I heard you went to church
that morning. And the rope

was it already noosed? knotted?
I didn't go to church that morning.

I stopped praying when I colored the Savior
black and blue in CCD, his heart gold,

a cold purple crown.

But you went to church early that day.
And I missed the morning.

You would miss the evening.
It will pour on Christmas.

ii.
I woke up late,
brunched at the Toast

because Harvey's was closed,
my sister and I, frustrated.

You were muttering. Perhaps
praying? You were silent.

Crying? There was silence.
I had eggs over-hard on toast.

I scraped my plate clean.
And you swung.

iii.
Your three daughters are shaking, Donna.
Last night, your eyes were closed like mine

and I saw them screaming, tearing
at their hair, their young faces crumpled,

torrents of tears.
Their fingers only fists.

It was desperate, Donna.
I turned in my sleep so many times last night.

There was nothing else I could do.
You lay in your silence

your last words held fast in a still heart.
Winter settled thickly about you.

Political Dream 01

presidential debate at school
in one of those large auditorium classrooms
old-style, each candidate took the stage separately
McCain was first
before it all begain, however, i gave personally
gave Obama a copy of "Borderline Suicide"
He graciously accepted it
McCain takes the stage and for some reason i am
a member of his cadre, thus he offers me
one of the Budweisers in the minifridge
at the foot of the stage
he is already drinknig one
they are pounders
he begins his speech, which is interactive with the audience
he begins talking about the cost of war, talking about
casualties as if they were statistics
and i am somehow behind him on the stage, facing stage right
i say "they aren't for the parents of those people who die"
which doe not go over well with McCain or the audience
so i fall to the floor on my stomach and lie there
for the remainder of McCain's turn.
Once he is done, the lights come back on and intermission
starts.
I grab a Budweiser.
Then Obama makes his appearance, despite intermission not being over
thus he begins talking to a half-empty auditorium
because people are up and about
because it's intermission
the first thing he does is start reciting the lyrics
to the MW song "Obsessed With Success"
I recognize what he's doing and make eye-contact
he smiles
People trickle back in and his speech goes over well.
I cannot get over the fact that he a.) he listened to my cd
and b.) he liked my song that much.
But I also start feeling completely cheated, like it's
actually completely horrible and ironic that Obama,
as obsessed with success as anyone I know,
is reciting a song i intended as satirical.
i catch up with Obama off-stage and he is the same,
gracious, smiling, nodding, betraying ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.
no one tries to remove me, i just slowly realize
that these people, Obama and his cohorts,
are vacuous.

Back 2 School Blues

I don't remember my dreams very often, and when I do, I have either a hard time piecing together a narrative because my dreams are often so chaotic I can't put them into words, or I don't have the attention span to focus long enough to fictionalize the raw data. However, when I do have a lucid dream or a lucid episode, I take note.
This is why I know now that despite struggling with the notion of returning to academia for the entirety of my short leave of it, I am clear on one thing: I never want to take a foreign language class again.
Last night I dreamt that I had returned to school and my first class of the semester was German Idealism in Ham-Smith 19. Equally excited and suspicious (characteristic of my love/hate relationship with the field), I am waiting patiently for the Professor to show up. After a few minutes, in walks a man who looks a lot like Professor DeVries but much less substantial (clearly reared on corn flakes as opposed to schnitzel). Not three steps behind him is an even shorter man with black, thick-rimmed glasses and a mane of white hair.
To my surprise, pseudo-DeVries proceeds to just stand in front of the class, slightly to one side, jovially saying and doing absolutely nothing as the other man, nameless, begins writing on the blackboard. I quickly become anxious and confused and realize that the man is writing an elaborate schedule on the board that is beginning to indicate that a.) I would be spending more time in this class than I had intended or wanted to, and b.) this probably isn't a German Idealism course. I raise my hand and not-pseudo-DeVries calls on me.
"Isn't this German Idealism?" I ask.
"This is Spanish class," he viciously responds.
Taken aback by the misunderstanding, I promptly blank out and the next thing I know I am watching porn in my dorm room.

Scenes from a Prison Dream

*Recent dream recreated from notes and memory and punctuated for narrative effect. Any resemblance to real people or actual events is purely coincidental*

I was sent to prison on a technicality. Apparently the now defunct college I was working for last winter was involved in some dubious financial practices and when it folded, all of us former employees were convicted of insider trading. Ouch.

I bore my incarceration as stoically as possible. Taking a page out of the Avon Barksdale book, I resolved only to count the first day and the last day; no use worrying about what you can't change. Prison wasn't so bad. I seemed to spend most of my time wandering around the common areas (cafeteria, exercise yard, etc...) and trying to avoid any confrontations with my fellow inmates.

The food was terrible. At one point an inmate who bore a striking resemblance to this kid Matt I had 10th grade gym with offered to make me a sandwich out of some substance he called "yurt." I was grateful and offered to supply my own bread. He looked annoyed and made me a sandwich using his own bread.

Dream yurt tasted just like tuna fish. I don't eat tuna fish and ended up throwing the sandwich out. I rummaged through a refrigerator looking for something else. I couldn't find anything, so I picked the yurtwich out the trash and ate the soggy bread. Being a vegetarian in prison is hard.

At some point I was raped by a short, unshaven man with long, greasy hair. It wasn't so bad, just another unpleasant but inevitable part of life inside - the prison equivalent of paying taxes or getting a cavity filled.

I think the rape even broke the ice with the other prisoners. I heard a rumor that the greasy guy was planning to rape me again. I went to his cell to get it over with and he was face down on his bunk with a shiv in his back. I had friends, apparently.

I stood watching some inmates steal a basketball from the juvenile inmates we shared recreation space with.

"That's terrible," I said to my friend, who looked like Portland Trailblazers center Greg Oden, only with beaded cornrows.

"Hey, man, you know you'd do the same damn thing if you was out there," dream-Oden replied.

"Half those kids are bigger than me," I gestured at my skinny, suddenly shirtless chest for emphasis, "If I was out there, I'd be the one getting robbed."

"Hehe, you right, boy, you right," dream-Oden chuckled, "Fuckers'd be ON you."

Inside, I smiled. His approval meant a lot to me.

A Dream of Human Flight

For years I've had recurring dreams in which I abruptly fall and wake up. Usually the fall is only a few feet, a missed step off a curb or stair, and I'm grateful that I wake up before I hit the ground. Occasionally, however, I find myself at a much greater height, often deliberately stepping out into space from a cliff or building and since the result is always the same as the more modest falls, I find these to be my most disappointing dreams; a chance for flight (imagined) lost.

Recently I had my first successful dream of flight. I had attended a wake (whose I forget) and as my sister was taking the death especially hard, I was asked to bring her home and keep an eye on her. We returned to my parent's home, which had been transformed in the dream from a modest two story farmhouse into a swank, metropolitan high rise penthouse. My distraught sister went to sleep on a couch and I retired to the master suite.

At some point during the night I heard scratching and discovered that my parents' dog and cat had both gotten trapped in my room and were trying to get back out. I got up to open the door and discovered that the cat had shit on the floor. Too late. Angrily, I let the animals out, checked on my sister and began to clean up the cat's mess. I carried the cat shit to the master bathroom to flush it away and was astounded to find that the bathroom opened into a massive room with floor to ceiling glass windows on all sides overlooking the town (the setting seems to have been downtown Dover, NH but it had been altered into a bustling metropolis).

There was enough space in the room to run at full speed for some distance and I amused myself by running back and forth before I became self-conscious that someone might be watching me through the windows. I stopped and realized my mother was there and I asked if the glass was tinted. She explained that no, the glass wasn't tinted but that we were too high up for anyone to see. An argument ensued about whether or not we were visible and to prove my point, I walked to a window and without pausing, calmly stepped out into the air.

At this point I fully expected to, as usual, drop a few feet and then wake up, heart pounding. However, this time I fell for several seconds before I gradually slowed and then began to rise. My heart now pounding from excitement, I realized that I was effortlessly, inexplicably, most certainly flying. Argument about tinted glass forgotten, I soared over downtown, changing altitude and speed at will, buzzing a few feet off the ground and then rocketing up to hover several hundred feet above the city. Conditioned by years of film and fantasy, flight was everything I had hoped for and imagined.

Eventually, I returned to the ground where I was obliged to give a press conference. I of course said all the right things, blithely denying any assertions that I was special and assuring the audience that yes, I was prepared to elude the Venus rockets that had been engineered specifically to seek me out and pierce my superhuman heart (not sure when that came up).

"Coach keeps me ready, one in twenty of those things is gonna get you - even me - and you just have to be prepared. I'm not worried."

3:07 am. I woke up. Got a class of water, jotted down some notes, then, exhausted, fell asleep for six dreamless hours.