Saturday, September 26, 2009

it is on the surface of my tongue
this waiting
in the webbing of my fingers
distraction

the skin of my shoulders
is rounded with
prediction

and behind my knees the cables
seize

do not say genetics
do not say again

it is on the surface of my tongue
this lie

Thursday, September 24, 2009

i have five minutes

no time, then, to write of the airplane ride - skimming above the crowds, following, at maybe sixty feet up, the curves of the beach.

i'm more interested in when i was walking with some friendly crowd and had, for some reason, knives in my hand and i said i thought it would be fun if i could juggle and i threw three of them up and then they came down in the hundreds.

but, in coming down they were plastic.
good thing.

someone else, mocking me tossed up forks, then spoons and as they each came down, in the many hundreds now, they would occasionally take on a pattern in the flux of their falling like the starlings that compress and explode into black knots and sprays of birds.

then, i saw my mother floating in the river. i tried to get her to the bank as i know she can't swim but the tide was moving suddenly faster, like currents do, and we were headed for a place that forced the water through and all the speed and pressure was gathering and compressing. as in such a situation the only option was to not fight it and try not to go under.

i think i woke then. early early.
then back to sleep and dream of Instanbul. much much there. my brother, who looked much like Osama bin Laden and/or Bobby McFerrin was giving a cello concert on the street. He was very good and I could hear him as I sat on the cement steps high up in a building near by. I was playing with a mesh screen on a window, hearing the music far below and wondering why I was not there, visibly, to support him. There was some other extensive bit carrying someone's child (not my own - 5ish. maybe from my book). The child was heavy, ever heavier but needed me. On the other side of the building was an open-air lunch place, filled with men in turbans and wide-faced staring cats. The narrative there - lost. Later I was walking through a Turkish plaza and said stupidly outloud, "I can't believe I can just walk through here with this homemade bomb." lost bits. Later - an intercom announced "Go get your stuff out of the building. It's coming down." The building looked structurally sound as I entered. I didn't know why it had to come down or why they were sending us back into it if it was going to be demolished so soon.

many lost details but these dreams were very much made of cement and water and faces in enormous realism. (i can still feel the temperature of the boys leg under my forearm).