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.
