Dream Records #626-635 with Alchemical Notation

    #626 – Ted Bundy doing drugs to self-medicate. He tried to kill himself, you know. He had personal conversations like this one to lure you in. Brutal things. Burning, sinful lusts. 🜂

    #627 – The crowd is shouting for Cassius Clay to get up from the floor. “Get up!” The stress of panic attacks and manic episodes is too much. “What are you doing? Get up!” 🜃

    #628 – That duck is drunk. Or the other way ‘round. And I’m sorry if this embarrasses you. 🜄

    #629 – I’m in Russia, visiting. Seeing the monumental memorials again. I’m to meet my ex-wife at the flag garden honoring national alliances. But she doesn’t show and I have to raise the flag myself. 🜃

    #630 – I’m with Dahmer’s mother chasing UFOs. Her ways are movable. Her car is fast. Aimless down a crooked trail. We took photos, but they all came back blurred. 🜁

    #631 – A dozen parachutist soldiers in our church. Unannounced. They knock over the sanctuary lamp as they crash through the ceiling. But no one is watching. I think they should apologize but no one is listening. And the altar is burning. 🜂

    #632 – He moves his bishop across the board, favoring the concrete over the abstract. Food. Drink. Sex. These are the forces that motivate him. Because. Since. Cause and effect. Calculated pauses. No affect. No blinking. Bishop takes queen. 🜃

    #633 – His fingers. Her lip. And teeth. Too many teeth. And blood. So much blood. His screaming. Her smile. 🜂

    #634 – Martin Luther is pouring me a beer. “Come drink with me,” he says (though I don’t speak German). “The devil harasses, but you amuse me. Tell me again what you wrote in your book about the socialist Jesus.” Jack Lemmon is there too, but he doesn’t say a word. 🜄

    #635 – It’s the Zapruder film stuttering. Frame by flickering frame. But the convertible is empty. Loop. It’s the Zapruder film stuttering. Frame by flickering frame but the convertible is empty. Loop. It’s the Zapruder film stuttering. Frame by flickering flame but the convertible is empty. Loop. It’s the Zapruder film...🜂

A Future History of a Remembered Apocalypse

    Fifteen years ago, just before midnight, on the night that the mounted police came to our door, I was in the basement writing unrhymed distortion poems for the Free-Radical Press. The horses’ Lorenz-Helmschmied barding was crafted of plaited ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene fibers. They rode silently to the door. We never heard them at all.

    We didn’t hear the blackwing Megiddo-Copters either, sweeping low over the valley with pulsar flares and active INVICTVS tracking systems. There would be no escape.

    The mounted police came with calamitous purpose, looking to deal punishment, harboring the view that the world needed God’s wrath to purify it and wearing neuro-peripheral interference shock gloves. The demands of divine justice held in human hands. We were alienated and estranged, enemies in the mind of wicked works. Dumbfounded and numb with broken hearts.

    Life inaccessible without proof of citizenship. Blood like the blood of a corpse without a demonstration of loyalty. Compliance. Peace through strength. And peace through blood. Split skulls and spilled blood. Casualties mounted.

    We heard a voice over the loudspeaker call out the command, “Go!” And the cavalry attacked, a hellish invasion with bitter biologicals and chemical weapon sprays. Federally authorized weapons of mass destruction. Flashes of fire and brimstone smoke and sulfur.

    An army of red-blooded pressurized American patriots was gathered at the place, ready to make an overwhelming assault with fireworks and jump-cut explosions. Two hundred million poorly trained agents authorized to use excessive force without legal restraint.

    I saw single mother saints and brown skinned prophets shot down and trampled. The house erupted into flames. I ran out of the house, scrambling to put on my shoes and my coat as I fled.

Revelation 16

Long Time, No Time

    I don’t want to see it.

    Her face framed in the doorway like a mistake, through dimmed and dreaming eyes. You should see her now-bruised and bound, sick and wounded, erring. Her hair is different now. She is alive and well, honeyed and oiled, but looks abandoned. I reach out, react. Feel my throat break free. Out. Down.

    She says, “C’mon. One more kiss.”

    I don’t want to say it.

    She took and split, my ex of one brief period of grief. Forsaking friend and covenant. Why does she look abandoned? The way she leans, tilts one hip. She opens the door and moves closer with a mischievous smile, her most Cheshire. The ground is shaky. I notice her shoes-oiled and scuffed.

    She says, “Long time, babe.”

    She says, “long time, no time.”

    Outside her empty window, a basement staircase plunges into soil. A heart of shadow glooms in the doorway like tokens of light in a graveyard lot. The air folds. The porch lights flicker. The steps and sidewalk furrow. The driveway falls.

    I tumble into the collapse with her silhouette of sinking concrete, with damp earth and forgotten things. Flesh and body consumed.

    I don’t want to be led this way.

(Proverbs 2, 5)

Dream Police and Rêv Conditioning

    “What am I going to do? I’ll be marked for Rêv Conditioning for sure. It’s illicit dreaming. A 0180 infraction with repeat modifiers.”

    “What are you talking about, Jeff?”

    “I’ve been dreaming about Shay – a woman that I work with.”

    “Multiple occasions?”

    “Three times now. The first time I dreamt that she pulled open her blouse to show me her new bra, but I recognized it as one of my ex-wife’s brassieres.”

    “That is strange. And the second?”

    “We – Shay and I – were at a museum together when her husband showed up to accuse me of having an affair with her. In the dream she defended me, saying that it wasn’t true – even though she knew, in the dream, I did in fact want to have an affair with her.”

    “And the third?”

    “The third was just the opposite. She was cold me, refused to speak to me or to look at me. And when I asked if I’d offended her in some way she said ‘Nothing.’”

    “She wouldn’t answer you?”

    “No. I asked if I’d offended her and she answered only with the word ‘Nothing.’”

    “It sounds as if you’re right to be concerned about the Dream Police.”

    Agents of the Imperial Dream Police smear a thin layer of ectoplasm over their naked bodies which acts as both an aphrodisiac gel and as an infiltration serum. This, along with the nictitating membranes that cover their eyes, allows them to slip into the unconscious sights and sounds of your sleep and dreams. And the sodium thiopental they secrete from their pores allows them to see through the absurdities of the dream and to know the truth of your reveries. They are weird figures dressed in white suits and dark-faced transparent helmets, communicating in grunts, clicks, and whistles.

    Dreams are great magicians, conjuring up fully formed and vanishing locomotives on their way to purgatory, poisoned uteruses, and piles of eggs stacked in the corner of the room.

    It all seems rather obvious in the light of the new morning, I suppose. Hardly even worth writing about. But if we accept the interpretive principle that we are each individual within our dreams, these rather commonplace dreams might become somewhat more revelatory. I don’t know what to think about that. I don’t know if I want to think about that. There’s too much bleeding in the Red Zone City to worry about a nightmare of knives and ex-wives.

    There will be no telephone apologies, only bad dreams. And I cannot worry about the Dream Police right now. Politicians may be able to get away with that sort of lack of concern – and not just in dreams, in waking life too. But me? Not so much. The Dream Police don’t care what the dreams mean. Symbols are arbitrary. Signifier and signified are both fluid- there’s no enduring link between the two. Meaning is irrelevant to their procedures. There’s too much else going on.

    And the Dream Police are jealous of their magic.

Should I Be Afraid?

    Perhaps the most interesting of men will come after me – let him. Let him come with his ancient cross. Let him come with his camera. His incapacitating taser. Let him. Let him follow me, stalk me through Midwestern cities. Should I be afraid?

    Should he come with merchandised angels. With pulp marketed biblical kitsch. Keychains. Personalized gospel ashtrays. Plastic figurines of twenty-first century American evangelical saints complete with kungfu grip and detachable assault rifle fun. Should I be afraid?

    Inordinate affection for all kinds of evil. Teenage idolatry brings destruction.

    See him again – like some great patriot – Alexander the Great on the shore, square jawed, crew cut, blue eyes - leading an army of the devoted and faithful towards world domination. Leading them to the water, to the rock. Living turns and leads inward. Should I be afraid?

Misquoting It - And Badly

     “I know the truth of it. I know what is real and what is required,” she said to me in the hall where it smelled of sweat, and stale cigarette smoke, and boiled cabbage. She cornered me, trapped me in the hall and insisted that I listen to her as she told me a series of stories of divorce heard second hand and strange tales of invisible, two-headed children at play. “You’ve heard the stories,” she asserted. “You’ve heard the reports of sinners, and satanists, and sexual deviants.”

    I nodded, not knowing what to say.

    She began again, stepping closer. I could smell her sour breath. “We live in an assassination culture…”

    “Cut it out, Hazel. I’ve warned you about this.” The booming voice of the landlord echoed through the hall. “Leave that man be.”

    Hazel turned away from me toward the unseen voice. “But…”

    “Now I’m not gonna' tell you again. This is your final notice.”

    “But…”

    “Your final notice, Hazel. Your identity – your finances will all be transferred.”

    This whole conversation was making me uncomfortable. I just wanted to deliver the mail and be on my way. I had a route to finish and a supervisor monitoring my time. “I think I may have compromised…” I started to say.

    “Compromised,” The landlord repeated. “Yes. That’s the word. The true word.”

    I nodded, not knowing what to say.

    “She’s alive, right?” the landlord sneered.

    “Well, I don’t know…”

    “Alive, but genetically modified. I mean, look at her.” He grabbed her chin and turned her face toward me so I could see her. Take a better look. “Look at her. That building, that body’s been vacant for months.”

    “And you’re still charging her rent?” I demanded.

    “You know what they say,” he sneered. “The sorrow of the world is death. The sorrow of the world is death.”

    “I know the reference,” I told him. “And I know that you’re misquoting it. And badly.”

    I looked at her again and she smiled at me. “We see your open and palpitating heart. My ears and my heart.” She laughed. “These,” she said pointing to the landlord, “are the manifestations not of doubt, but of deliberate, willful disbelief. This is the sixth hour darkness of hardhearted, soft-headed politicians.”

    “Hey, hey, hey,” objected the landlord. “I don’t wanna’ hear no more of that. I’m warnin' you.” But he turned and left without a word or action more. Hazel returned to her apartment. And I continued along my route.

What Is My Brain Doing While I'm Asleep?

 

I have, for the past several nights, had dreams that I could not quite recall when I woke in the morning. This is not, in itself, unusual. Most dreams are forgotten the moment the sleeper awakens. They disappear like a breeze, stirring the mind for a moment and then gone. But I have practiced trying to recall them, and frequently find material in them that can be used in my writing. I appreciate my dreams and have worked at trying to hold on to the fleeting fragments that remain as I awaken. Still – these recent dreams have not stuck with me after I lifted my head from the pillow.

Except that there has been a nagging suspicion that these forgotten dreams have had something to do with my ex-wife – my first ex-wife to be more precise. But that’s where the precision ends. I cannot recall the situations, events, or characters of the dreams. I don’t know what happened. I only suspect, or perhaps fear, that she was there.

And this causes me some concern. Not so much that she was there – I know that even now these several years later I am still recovering from her departure and putting my life back together. Things in my life are much improved and I’m happy in my work, my hobbies, and my relationships. But – and here’s the real question: What is my brain doing while I’m asleep? What’s going on up there? I don’t trust my mind – even when I’m awake it must be carefully monitored to keep it under control. When I’m asleep I can’t control it. What is going through my brain when I’m asleep?

Addendum:

Last night I dreamt that my friend, Rick, was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Maybe dreams I can’t remember of my ex-wife are fine. Let’s go back to that.

At the Airport with No Shoes (a dream)

I’m scrounging for change, picking up quarters in the parking lot of an abandoned video store in this town where the air smells like a smoldering cigar. 

I’m at the airport with no shoes. 

I’m attending a birthday party for dreadlocked children I don’t know. I’m greeted by a woman I never knew. 

You spray me in the face with a can of mace after I apologize. You embrace me and kiss me on the lips, but I know that this, even this, is another of your lies. 

I’m making mistakes- simple mistakes- so I’m retracing my steps to correct what I’ve done. 

I’m at the airport with no shoes. 

Dreaming with a Red Hat

 I’m out on the streets 

while the shadows are still long 

trying to recapture thoughts and dreams 

that disappeared before the dawn.

There was a hallway that went nowhere

and I was never there. 

There was the smell of urine 

lingering in the air 

while liberals, Catholics, Freemasons, and Jews

were rewriting the dictionaries

that you disdain to use. 

Someone somewhere

had barricaded the church-house doors. 

Was this dream mine, or is it yours?

All these codes and signs 

read more like yours than mine. 

A thousands words of poison and deceit. 

A thousand words of fraud and treachery. 

And so it seems

I will be stuck,

At least for a time,

with all your distressing dreams. 

She

She seized and cut my still beating heart, left me exsanguinating into the resurrection machine. She was the voice of all the repeated, reheated, recycled, rehydrated whispers in the heavy, heaving air. 

She disappeared into the light and shadow, disappeared into the distant police sirens. All of this was her loathing pretense of a loving embrace. 

She exploded on the threshold. She was beyond the door, behind the walls. She was beyond all the crowded machinery, going through other doors to other places.

Half Deaf and Unsure

 

Now half deaf and unsure 

if the silence 

or the roaring voice is real 

A thunderous, bottomless noise 

in the freezing cold  

of a windowless room 

The lights gone out 

crushed skulls thrown forward 

knocked out, dead 

oh God, oh God 

Ghostly floating silver 

obsidian sparkle 

lights extinguished by pain 

Blind danger, gasping in surprise 

for all the fumbling frustrations 

all the blood from the mouth, the head 

Oh God, oh blind God 

not this, or anything else 

God, not this

Dream Police and Psychic Sympathy

                Agents of the Dream Police are trained and equipped to use the Rodes-Buchanan Twinning Device to infiltrate the dreams and reveries of the subjects of their investigations. The Rodes-Buchanan Twinning Device is an electrical device capable of transmitting human thought and physiological responses via psychic transmission. As an added benefit it can also determine the specific weight and density of each of those individual intercepted thoughts. The Dream Police are forced to use this bit of paranormal technology instead of invading dreams by their own power because they are psychics without spirit. They see nothing and they understand less.

But the twinning device creates a psychic sympathy between the minds and bodies of connected subjects so that, despite their lack of spirit and vision and understanding, they are able to see something after all. After connecting the leads and wires to the heart and head of the subject, (and after using his personal, individual dactylogram to authorize and activate the psychic transfer) Doctor Benjamin Test – chief of the Levant Area Dream Police - injects Field Agent Basil Ikon with alternating doses of Semi-synthetic Eukoldol-7 (a radically redesigned version of the opioid popular among Nazi soldiers during World War II-really evil shit, trust me) and Pervition (a pill form of methamphetamines, also popular with the Nazis). Sometimes he supplemented these with chewing gum laced with cocaine – the kind used by one-man UN submarine pilots. They chew it as they penetrate and patrol the rivers of the Roman Empire.

They also ingest the yage, the South American entheogen which contains the chemical Telepathine, which fluoresces green under ultraviolet light. It may be toxic in large doses, but when calibrated correctly it facilitates psychic connection between users even over long distances.

All the reports and memos filed by Dream Police agents are printed on paper that resists reproduction – so it is difficult to say with certainty what they knew and when they knew it, but it does not appear that they knew anything about the visionary dreams received by Paul.  Usually they’re much better about tracking this sort of thing, but every now and again they miss something.

For example, it isn’t widely known outside of the Dream Police offices, but the American author, and riverboat grumbler, Samuel Clemens (better known as Mark Twain) had a premonitory dream of the death of his brother, Henry. Clemens dreamt of his brother lying inside a metal coffin with a bouquet of white flowers. He was wearing one of Samuel’s suits. About a month later the steamboat aboard which Henry was working exploded killing nearly 250 people, including Henry. It was this psychic dream that convinced Samuel Clemens to join the Society of Psychical Research.[i]

I dreamt that when I saw her again after all this time in that skeeball arcade she was engaged in a project of surgical self-discovery – gross lip enlargement, and overstretched blepharoplasty. And that she was dating a balding and goateed man wearing a bandana tied around his forehead – who bragged to me about banging such a classy broad. He smacked me on the shoulder and laughed, “but you know what I’m talking about, don’t you brother?” She turned on me with her grotesquely swollen lips and said, “You can’t tell me what to do anymore.” But I never had.

Was this dream psychic in anyway? Was it prophetic or premonitory? Good Lord, I hope not – for her sake as much as for mine. Even after what she put me through, she deserves better than that.

And then it comes. Somewhere Doctor Test injects Agent Basil Ikon with the promised Eukodol-7, an enlarged dose, the syringe like a cannon overcharged with double cracks. But first comes the Succinylcholine - a skeletal muscle relaxant administered intravenously. It is commonly used before surgery, mechanical ventilation, and electroshock therapy. It induces a near total paralysis of the body – including the respiratory system. Dream Police agents using the Buchanan-Rodes Twinning Device often have to be reminded to breathe as they dream.  Agent Basil enters the dark defile, the total darkness of shadow lands. The world is the tomb of a homicide victim. Immutable. His blood is chilled. Death is the shepherd of the grave, feeding on the flock. “Mangez, ô mort, et buvez, et buvez encore,” he says and then he sleeps, and sleeping he steals your dreams.

I don’t know if I’ve ever had any predictive dreams like Clemens dreaming of the death of his brother or like Paul dreaming of the Macedonian man, though I have had my fair share of bizarre dreams that seem like they were heavily layered with symbolic content that could maybe have been prophetic. But prophetic of what I do not know. They could have meant anything and if they could mean anything then they mean nothing. Maybe. Niente di niente. Maybe.

I still remember the three interpretive questions that Mister Spanogle taught us in my high school English class: 1) What does it say? On the positive, physical level, what does the text say? What is it in the material world? 2) What does it mean? Grounded in the physical world but transcending that to something beyond the specific object – what is the dialectical idea? There may be competing ideas here, unresolved ideas, but that is acceptable. When you’ve moved beyond the mere words you can ask what means, but you must ask the first question first. Only then may you proceed. And after you’ve explored what it means you may ask the final question3) What does it mean to me? As an ultimate term of higher truth, as an article of faith, what does it mean? What does this higher truth mean to me? How will it organize my experience and behavior? What practices will this encourage? What orthopraxis? He wanted us to apply these questions to understanding the William Carlos Williams poem The Red Wheelbarrow, but I have continued to use them through all my life. I don’t know if Mister Spanogle studied Saussure, though I assume that he probably did. And I don’t know if structural linguistics has anything to contribute to the field of oneirology, but I suspect that it might.

I dreamt recently that I was asked to write a novelization of a series of youth retreat meetings, to interview the teens and young adults who’d attended the religious retreat and to craft a novel of their experiences. In the dream I was excited about the project even though I knew with a certainty that it would lead to renewed conflict with the leadership committee. I dreamt once of my now ex-wife asking me repeatedly, “Where were you?” But I cannot remember the context of the question – and context is king, even in dreams. I dreamt also of rain, I dream frequently of rain – probably because it hasn’t rained here for many weeks and I miss the rain. I dream of petrichor.

Do you smell that,” Doctor Test asks the oblivious patient strapped to his Rodes-Buchanan twining device in the darkness of the hidden inner chamber. “It is death,” he says as he patiently applies perfumed oils and curative cosmetics for the skin to the oozing pustules on Agent Ikon’s arm. The injection sites of Dream Police operatives are regularly infected and require frequent applications of soothing lotions.

I dreamt of a unicorn trapped in a palm tree. I dreamt of a Catholic priest stabbed to death in the confessional and thrown from a third story window. I dreamt that I was bursting into melancholic unfriended flames. And even if you can’t spell “melancholy” without “holy,” it was a terrible dream. I dreamt of an assassin firing at children on a playground and of my ex-wife screaming at me for tackling the shooter and calling for the police – not because she was afraid I’d be injured myself in the melee, but because she believed I was taking my anger at her out on him. Dreams make no sense.

Summon the elder ones. Smear the oil; recite the prayers. Doctor Test is not ready to turn his test subjects over to the pawing shovels of the resurrection men, even when they’ve become vicarious junkies like Agent Ikon. Outside, the wind picks up, swirling the dust and trash in the streets. Will agents of the Dream Police begin to focus their psychic twinning device on me and my dreams? I do not know and I am fearful. What does this mean? Timor mortis conturbat me.

---

[i] Founded in 1882 to advance the cause of understanding of those events and abilities commonly described as ‘psychic’ or ‘supernatural’, the Society for Psychical Research–the SPR, had its roots and antecedents in the ancient Roman Society of the Paranormal qua Recondite-the SP(q)R, and is the research branch of the Dream Police operations.

 

In the Night (I Was Dreaming of You)

The other night I had a strange and terrible dream about my ex-wife. It left me unsettled. Not sad. Not angry. But … on edge and ill at ease. Discomforted.

I shared the dream with a friend of mine and he encouraged me to maybe write her a letter (even if I had no intention of sending it to her) about the dream and how it made me feel - as a sort of therapy I guess. Or at least an exercise in self reflection. 

I didn't write her a letter (she wouldn’t respond even if I did). Instead I wrote a song about it as I carried the mail and delivered packages. 

There was more to the dream - it was long and complicated, full of absurdities (as dreams usually are.  But this was enough to make me feel better about it  

The Kingdom of Heaven Is Hers

 

How blessed are the poor in spirit; the kingdom of heaven is hers. 

She was one of those lovely things I’ll always remember - a beautiful girl with deep chocolate eyes. When she would laugh it was always too loud and she was always reluctant to speak. She left her apartment just after dusk and she never came back. 

How blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted. 

Fast beat driving - heartbeat slow and irregular. Snatched from the street. Unmelodious chords in the parking lot. Friction sounds. Grinding telephones and no answer. 

How blessed, the meek. They will inherit the land. Her mother told her, “Be careful out there,” and “come home safe.” Now she refuses to take solace. “Prayer never works.” She stands at the mirror in a curious combination: half in a trance, half aware. There are only doubts and goodbyes. Cold black holes that never go away. 

How blessed are the ones who are hungry and thirsty for righteousness, for justice. They will be satisfied.  

You can never forget the way blood glistens in moonlight. Do the dead stay dead? Is this the way the world ends? With unanswered questions? 

How blessed are the ones who show mercy for they will have mercy themselves. 

Something has changed. Power rising. Red roses, white, yellow, pink. Eyes full of light. But still the thorn, the prick, the blood. The investigation continues. We don’t know and what could we say? 

How blessed are the pure in heart; they are the ones who will see God. 

From November to January we wonder. Dreaming. Imagining. Hoping. Fearing. Freezing. It’s all too much and too hard to bear. I don’t want this, any of this. No relief in nightmare. No weal when I wake. 

How blessed the peacemakers; they are the daughters of God. 

She was weak and unsure. Too delicate for this world, more suited for the next. This was the flaw in her beauty: she was afraid of her voice. In a flash, open slightly. Two paramedics in a whistle. Alive, now dead against a background of twilight stars. Ethereally beautiful, eternally young. 

How blessed are the tormented, the persecuted, the beaten and abducted. The kingdom of heaven is hers.

I Was Possessed by the Devil

 

So it was a nightmare, that moonless night just after we’d moved into the house. Strange things. Demonic things. The sound of children speaking vulgarities in the dark. I remember my mother leaning over the bed as I was rapidly shaking. Shaking harder than before. 

I was possessed by the devil. 

But the words had no context and the sounds had no meaning. You know how people will fabricate stories. Try to understand. Try to appreciate the situation. Can you feel those fine hairs on your arms and the back of your neck rising? Tingling? 

“He’s asleep again.” 

“Again?” 

“Still. He’s still asleep.” 

Despite the vibrations. Despite the noise, I am still asleep. Light is blazing in the rain spattered windows. George Bush and Ronald Reagan are on the television whether we like it or not. Permission was given, that is the first. Second, external spirits will infest the place. Then comes the oppression.

Where is the life I had before? I thought it was there, but I was wrong. It disappeared. It fled into the dark as I was sleeping.

Late at night, even now, I still dream comfortless dreams of something watching. Something is there. Nothing is there. Nothing is there except a voice. Voices telling me to go out and to do. Something is there. Eyes that are not eyes. Voices that are not voices. And my pale face in the dark. A garble of voices, still meaningless. 

Overdrawn and Underslept

    I woke, like fabled Nebuchadnezzar, from a dream I could not remember and the whole day that followed was filled with auguries I could not interpret and omens I could not understand:

    The day began with broken plants and scattered dirt. Methodist bells chimed for blood and ancient sacrifices. The sky was heavy with clouds and the threat of rain. The air was full of clanging alarms but no trains. There were strange numbers for unfamiliar places as I walked in circles all over town. I was here before and will be again. I had time to think, but no time to write; time to drink and get into fights. 

    But still I managed to do some of each. I sent futile messages into the void, hoping for a response of rejection or repayment. But expecting neither. And at the end of it all, I stitched myself together as best I could with needle and thread purchased at the dollar store and made dinner for two. I went for a walk into the gloaming but turned back before dark.

    I am overdrawn and underslept. And I worry about tomorrow.

The Stars Went Out

 

I wasn’t sleeping; I watched them go. Without a word, without a warning, the stars slowly winked out of existence. I watched their twinkling lights fade away into an inexplicable and mysterious silence. The learn’d astronomers were of no help. They muttered in their observatories about gravitational collapse and neutrino distortion waves. “These things happen,” they told us. “What can you do? But there will be other stars in other galaxies. The universe is very large you understand…”

Maybe they are right. The universe is vast and strange. I’ve heard stories like this, and believed them I suppose, stories of unholy stones transported across Siberian wastes by train. I’ve heard the villagers whisper of the mark of the devil burned into pale flesh. I’ve heard rumors of celebrity gladiators left to starve in forgotten obscurity. I’ve watched self-righteous mobs parade through the streets with fascist icons held above their head. And all of this seemed normal, I guess.

The stars went out and I dreamt of people stabbing and cutting themselves with large kitchen knives and broken shards of crockery. They could not be restrained. If we accept the interpretive principle that we are each individual within our dreams, this might be somewhat revelatory. I wasn’t sleeping, but I could do nothing to stop them. I saw them extinguished. My eyes are fine; reality’s out of focus.

Still, we were happy in their light for a time. And I remember hope.

This Cannot Be a Surprise

There are military medals waiting at the end of the parade for corporate and corporeal thugs, as well as for the vacuous children of the President. See them standing there at the reviewing stand? Criminally debased and festooned with ink black ribbons and braids and bunting for then event. Who knew that rebuilding the concentration camps could prove so profitable, so patriotic?

Agents of the FBI – the agency now purged of all weak and failing elements – have bravely awarded themselves the highest honors that cointelpro can bestow, in celebration of the carefully orchestrated suicide of certain targeted leftists. “We did that. We are doing our part.”

They have planted thorns and snares, scattered weeds like an angry Ancient Near Eastern deity. They have reconvened the Court of Oyer and Terminer. (The magistrates are witches now!) Their collection of fingernail clippings and ear wax, used dental floss and Band-Aids will be on display across the nation until November. Get your tickets now.

There are strangers in the cemetery and we had no idea.

The welds of the Earth are weak; the foundations of the Earth have cracked. The sun is shifted in the sky. Mountains tumble, the seas foam. The void opens beneath us. All is reversed, perverse – this universe. And this cannot be a surprise. Not after the last two years.

L’Obelisk

It sprung up from the ground in the middle of the night, smooth polished stone without waning. It towered over the people who stood starring up at in from the courthouse square like a threat. Like an ultimatum. The people gathered there could not decide whether they should bow or cower. The obelisk undid them all.

Dead Prayers in the Far West Corner

J. saw the shadows in the far west corner of the factory even though no one else in the plant would ever speak of them. He saw the twisting shadows in the strange recesses of the far west corner every time he used the forklift to move a load of wire cable or steel platforms from the receiving area to the assembly floor. He saw that the shadows moved – and not just the movement of shadows as the sun moved across the sky, or the forklift’s headlamps swung across the wall; the shadows in the far west corner moved on their own. Strange behavior for shadows, especially since shadows really don’t even have behavior. In the few months that J. had worked in factory, he’d never had opportunity to look closely at the shadows. He drove past them as he moved pallets or hauled away dumpsters of trash, but he never stopped to explore. He wasn’t paid to explore.

On this particular day – it was a Wednesday, he remembered, he always felt the most tired on Wednesdays, and according to the watch board in the break room it had been 66 days since the last recordable time-loss accident – he was moving a crate of industrial hoses for the blast booth when he drove past the far west corner and he stopped. J. put the forks down and shifted into park. J. stared at the twisting, tenebrous void.

Slowly he realized that he couldn’t hear the roar of the blast booth any longer, nor the hum of the grit vacuums. He couldn’t hear the crackle and pop of the welder’s torches or the warning sirens of the cranes in motion overhead. Even the blatty rumble of the forklift’s diesel engine seemed muted and shushed. The factory was quiet, but not silent.

The shadows twisted in front of him, receding deeper into the corner from whence came the murmur of voices – chanting. Chanting prayers. Prayers in some forgotten language. A dead language. Dead prayers in the shadowy, dark corner of the factory.

Lulled by the soft syllables of the chanting, J. felt sleepy. Dizzy. Faint. But still the foreign tones drew him in; they called him. And though he could not understand their dulcet words, they filled him with ominous, incomprehensible, irresistible dread. “I’m drowning,” he thought. “I’m drowning, and she’s watching me. Watching me from the shore. She is watching me drown.” The rhythm of his internal soliloquy gradually assumed the cadence of the unseen chanters in the shadows.

And then

the horn that signaled lunch break broke his reverie. J. realized with a start that he’d sat with the forklift idling for at least 15 minutes. And he still hadn’t delivered the hoses to the blast booth. He knew he’d have to work double quick after lunch to get caught up. He also discovered that he was, from helmet to steel-toe boots, coated with a fine pink powder. This powder he would later have chemically analyzed and the analysis would show it to be some sort of anhydrous crystal residue.