Quixotic Fixtures

"The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest."
Kurt Vonnegut

My dreams come in vignettes. One minute I'm being fucked by a narcotic professor and the next John Belushi's rotting corpse is grasping my hand and holding a syringe to my forearm, and I'm stepping off the edge. I'm sitting in the backseat of my sister's car at 4 am listening to Allen Ginsberg: "Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour. Which way does your beard point tonight? " The engine is rumbling  and beat-up, and my legs are fucking freezing; he's gone and opened the window to smoke a cigarette. It doesn't matter because I'm dozing off, wrapped up in cigarette smoke and a fleece blanket, "The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely."
I wake up bleeding in an empty hospital room and screaming, and I know I've been dead but now I'm breathing again. I wake up like this, in other dreams and in other worlds, and I'm not sure if I really want to get back home.

It's 5 in the morning when we finally arrive, and I'm stumbling for my suitcase and history textbook, fleece blanket still around my arms. I don't register opening the door (perhaps it was ajar) and I fall in, and I think maybe I've stepped on the cat. It doesn't matter once I've settled on the couch; the blinds are still drawn and it's morning darkness I'm thankful for. I listen to myself breathe.

A close friend of mine appeared in one of my dreams that morning. He and I were inside a bus station, and my mind only registered the colors black and white.  His eyes were brilliant and heather gray, his mouth pulled into a grin.
My memory has become blurry, but he had tried to hold my hand. I pulled away almost instantly, and he was still smiling, and we were running through the station down the steps trying to get somewhere that wasn't where we were. It was remarkable and distilled and even now as I write this, the faintest cobweb of my dream has been swatted away.
Where were we going, Walt Whitman? I'm not sure you could answer that, but neither can I, and you seem better qualified than myself since you can manage your way through a lone supermarket.

I'm sitting on my sister's couch watching John Mulaney with Ryan. The only thing I have in common with my brother-in-law is that we both love stand-up comedy, and we'll sit for hours watching until one of us dips into  a dream. It's usually him who falls asleep first, and I can feign attendance of anyone I chose in his presence. It makes the apartment less forlorn.

The Microphones - I Felt Your Shape

We're traveling through a.m. radio frequencies and by god I hope we find out where we're going because the world is so unbearably large and we can't afford to get lost.


Happy Birthday, William.