Rear Window Anxiety Dream

We’ve been watching the unlikely 

couple a floor below us across an

alley in the city we are living in.

She is extremely well dressed and 

classy looking while he lies around

all day in filthy sweatpants and sports

team shirts drinking beer straight 

from the can while watching Classic

sporting events on ESPN as if they might

be live ones, rooting hard for teams

that have already lost and half

the players are traded, injured or dead.

He is especially exercised when he watches

prize fights that happened in the middle of 

the twentieth century. We’d like to tell him

to just look up the results on Google and save

himself all the aggravation that goes into

watching these guys pound the living shit 

out of each other, but what would

be the fun in that? I wonder if he tries

to place bets on the outcome of these matches

as he seems to be the kind of guy who will

bet on anything like how many red cars will 

drive past the apartment building in the next

hour. My wife says that’s ridiculous but I assure

you, a lot of money can be lost that way and

probably is. Not his money, of course. 

Which may account for all the yelling that 

goes on over there when the woman comes 

home after work. That and the fact their two kids

have been neglected, especially the younger

of the two, a boy, who seems to be covered head

to toe in some kind of grimy mess. The older

child, a girl, is six or so and misses most of

the action at a private school but still senses

the tension between her parents but knows it

is useless to intervene.

My wife speculates he might be the kind of

guy who would have access to the gun we need

for the assassination. I am against approaching 

him but she does anyway. While he thinks about

scoring one for us, she offers to take his kids

swimming at the central park lake. He says fine

and off they go. A while later they come back

but the boy is missing. “Where is Humpy?”

the father asks and the daughter says, “Oh, he

drowned. I tried to save him but it

was too late.” The father freaks out but 

the wife is unconcerned. Uses the opportunity

to grab the clicker and change the station.

Apparently, It’s all she has been thinking 

about for years.  

The father is inconsolable. 

The wife remains unconcerned, watching 

her shows. I say to my wife, “Maybe we 

misjudged those two.” My wife doesn’t seem

to care one way or another now that she 

has scored the assassination gun.

Reconnecting with an Old College Friend Anxiety Dream

All my attempts to reach

my college friend Bernard

were unsuccessful until

I found a number for a camp

North of Utica that only existed

in previous dreams.  I thought it was odd

that there was a phone listed for that camp

as it was too remote to have service.

Somehow, I reached him through a 

phone referral at a pay-by-the night-

hostel in Buffalo run by the Paris 

Review. Bernard was insistent we

meet him right away as they were

after him and what he had to tell me

was Top Secret.  I interpreted his

paranoia to his job working as a T agent 

even if had left that job over thirty years ago, 

Top Secret stuff never  goes out of style.  

Despite my skepticism about the urgency, 

I told him we’d be there as soon as we could 

which was likely to be  many hours from now 

as we were over  half a state away. 

Somehow, we made it to the Paris Review Hostel 

in record time, a little under an hour, and the helpful

desk clerk who looked like, and sounded 

like a clone of Alan Cumming, told us

he’d already left which I thought was 

unlikely as Bernard was missing a leg

and he hadn’t taken his customized

wheelchair.  

Since we were hungry, we decided to

check out Buffalo’s answer to Quincy Market

which was much shabbier and had way fewer

option than the one in Boston. The only

place that had anything remotely edible

was a beef place where we were turned away 

for service as we hadn’t ordered ahead of time.

Just as we were about to give up hope of

finding anything there was Bernard sitting

in a modified shopping cart. “Hurry,”

Bernard insisted, “we have to hurry before

everything closes.” Though it was only

One in the afternoon. I thought

stuff really closes early in Buffalo.

“Look,” Bernard said, in between bites of

a mixed deli meat hero, ”you are the only 

one I can trust to write this story.”

And it was a long story. Two heroes worth, 

at least, and he was still talking.

I didn’t see any way I was going to be able

to recreate what he was telling me as

I didn’t have anything to write on and my phone’s

battery was out of charge.  The more he talked,

the more I was worried, “Does this mean

they would be after me too?”

Laurie Anderson Anxiety Dream

“Everyone in the island was someone from TV

And everyone was saying, ‘Look at me, Look at me!’

Language is a virus.”

Maybe she was in my thoughts after

being signed up to follow her on Facebook 

or just because we were playing Home 

of the Brave, regardless, a mutual friend

assured them that I could access Boer War

funeral music for the requiem she was writing

celebrating a fallen hero.  Despite assuring 

everyone, I had no idea about anything to do

with the Boers, I was one of the wedding party

in rural Mercersburg, Pa, that was convening

in the cellar of the former president of

the prep school’s home. Laurie was about to 

marry a much younger, obnoxious dude the best

mam couldn’t stand and was warning her against.

I’m not sure why she valued my opinion as we’d

never met, but there I was under the asbestos 

wrapped steam heat pipes advising her against

the wedding. Trying to be diplomatic, I said

the prevailing opinion of the guy was that he 

was a creepy, obnoxious, self-involved, two-

faced narcissist but except for that everyone 

liked him.  The best man, who was now the groom,

concurred and it seemed as if the wedding was 

back on only with a different configuration of 

guests and participants. But first, we had to clean up

the grape juice the kids had spilled into the interior

of the hero’s coffin despite my warning them

to stay a good distance away. Luckily there was 

no body inside. Then we had to worry about 

Laurie’s potentially fatal operation on her lower 

extremities.  Everyone but the groom was in 

low spirits but he assured us all that everything 

would be fine now that we had dispensed 

with the inappropriate suitor. I didn’t think so. 

He was carried a gun.

Bardo State Anxiety Dream

I was disembodied in a Bardo

State not unlike the transition way station

in the Japanese movie, After Life.

Instead of being able to choose

a moment in time of extreme

happiness to spend eternity with,

I was about to be transmogrified

into a four-legged furry creature to be

named later. I asked one of the Eternal

Estate Angels if I could choose which

animal and they said, “No.” Empathically.

I asked the angel, who looked like an usher

at a louche movie theater, if I could talk

to someone in management but he assured me

it would be a waste of time.  

“Once it’s  decided, that’s it. No arguments.”

“So, who are these people?”

“The higher ups. Look, don’t worry about it.

It will seem strange at first but after awhile

it will seem normal and everything will be cool.”

While I was waiting for my animal to be

conceived, I floated around for a while, haunting

the places and the people I used to live with. 

Back in the waiting room, I watched a new cohort

of the recently deceased escorted into the Bardo

waiting area. Despite feeling free and easy like

a somnambulist in a waking dream, the constant

influx of new arrivals started to feel threatening

as if an overcrowding situation was inevitable.

I wandered down a shabby, white tile subway

station tunnel looking for a way out but all I could

find was a corridor of doors, all of them locked.

Einstein on the Beach Reconsidered:

a tone poem in five movements

1-

Remember walking in the sand listening

to the Shangri Las postulating theorems 

to the sea gulls, to the shore birds following

the patterns left behind in sand by the untied

laces of Albert’s red Chuck Taylor All Star high-tops

as if what was revealed there contained all

the answers to eternal riddles the avian species

have considered for eons.

2-

Nearby, on the lifeguard stands, counter-tenors

are practicing, their voices eliciting a cacophony

of disharmony that blends with the shrieking

of gulls and the drumming of the garbage men 

pounding the last remaining refuse from trash

cans lining the beach.

3-

A rhythmic chanting from the boardwalk is

a choral equivalent of surf music provided by

untrained voices of both sexes intoxicated

by experimental chemicals and malt liquor

Tall Boys left unattended by careless chaperones

attached to the Keep Kids Off Drugs annual dance.

4-

The unexpected introduction of air horns,

police sirens and spinning emergency lights

interrupts the final repetitive instrumental lines

as illegal bonfires begin to illuminate a crowded stage.

5-

In the vacuum created by arbitrary motion, 

gray matter and noise, the beach becomes 

a desert and the philosopher a stone.