dream 2

I was walking up a hill at golden hour, and at the top was a white tree blooming wide against a blue and pink sky. it was such a beautiful image that I thought to capture it on camera, so I ran home to my house, and the inside was slightly altered that it was in reality, but the details of it I cannot quite recall. I couldn't find my phone there either until I realized it was in my back pocket the whole time, so I went back out dressed in pajamas and the blue crocs I wear while walking the neighborhood. I wanted to run to the site so that I wouldn't lose the image to the approaching twilight, but when I tried I could only move in slow sprints, as if my legs were weighed down or suddenly foreign to the physics of this earth. But I kept on, extending leg after leg like I was walking through the thickness of water. And I gazed at the hill from afar and the tree was still there but the sky was orange, and I thought to myself that it would still make a beautiful picture, so I pushed onward to the top. But strangely, once I made it onto the hill, the scene had transformed so dramatically that even my dream consciousness was confused and bewildered. I was now standing before some kind of house that was burning, but it wasn't a ravenous flame. There were sparks and smoke and a general glow of fire but no flames. There was a fireworks in the distance that I thought may have ignited the present space, but other than the light of embers the sky was dark and purpled and grey. After a few minutes of gazing and trying to angle out different photographs, I felt something land on my shoulder. I looked at it was a crow. I took out my phone to take a self portrait, but once I turned the camera towards myself and the creature I realized that it was actually a vulture. Right then it tried to pierce my neck with its beak to kill me so that I could devour me, but I held its beak in my hands as it struggled to break me or my grip. Once again it attempted to stab me and once again I restrained it, but this time I took its neck in my hands and started to wring its neck. I threw the vulture on the ground and was about to stomp its head and body but I couldn't, feeling devastated at this act of cruelty I was about to commit. I felt it deeply and innately, a twisting of my insides and my conscience, yet I didn't understand the contradiction of my feelings, trading the vulture's death for my survival. And at that pained, conflicted moment, I woke...


- January 22, 2019

dream 1

I had a dream I was eating butterflies, must have been 2 or 3 of them already. I chewed the legs and the wings and had no thought until the last one, which I suddenly realized that I was eating butterflies. And a pang of shock overcame me, and I was horrified that I had even put such a beautiful thing in my mouth to devour so morbidly, crushing the legs and body into a thick, black and sticky paste between my teeth. I tried to spit it out but its texture was like molasses, sticking to my gums and the roof of my mouth, early glued to my molars that I had to use my tongue to pry it out. I continued to spit and retch to get the entrails out of me, but nonetheless some residue, like a swath of black ink, covered my tongue and a few morsels of its body lay wedged between the gaps of my teeth.


- January 22, 2019

Le Scaphandre et le Papillon

Bauby in bed, one
eye sewn shut like a doll except
no buttons, no hugged scars
A stroke

Mother Mary for my knees
for my hands, for my chest
A lover to breathe for the
tube in my neck

Sunken suit in a dense sea
pulling further down, abyss
Of the mind then the heart
--paralyzed in an automobile

So far from the living,
removed like a lung
The sky is always just
out of reach

at a shoreline splintered by sunlight
a million flickering
fast so hard it thumbs the heart
tender as old leather

body baptized by sun, body
blue in the waves, body purple
like a twilight setting fleshed in rough skin

the light a sound like wind chimes
the light sensing as a gentle wind

unblinded in a cloudless glow
flashing against the soft cloth of day
compassionate as doves, radiance soft cooing

horizon humming, bowing against the
gradient seas with ships ablaze, bowed just
as a string stretched across fragrant woods
carving into surface as a cello, a deep and
hollowed beauty--luminous impression

hallow of the heart
hoping for kindness
and mercy

you are the moon sowing
beams into the soil, start
a little seed - sprout -
green and growing and
you are a soft ripple humming
just loud enough against the waves
chamomile skin and smoking bones

limbus

like a rope that guides the
lines of night and day, or the
pale stripe of horizon that
lifts the sky from sea is the
limbus of heaven and hell

i live between with one
foot in the fire and the
other in a pool of light
with dual tongue that tastes
of Hades' cinders and Elysium jewels

always dead in the heart but
maybe a diminutive glow in the ventricles
always narrow in the bloodstream but
maybe a tired sun clotting in the flesh

daughter of jarius,
float back to earth
be undead yet unwhole