Sunday, September 30, 2007

My tooth fell out and cracked into three pieces. I tried to carry it around in my hand, in my pocket, in a little satchel, but again and again it grew thinner and smaller and lost. People stepped on it, it got covered in dust, fell behind things and in cracks. This happened in a dream.

I feel pale and in need of meat and bread.

Friday, September 28, 2007


Last night I dreamt a crow or raven landed on my shoulder. I say crow or raven because it was as big as a raven but looked more like a crow. I was in some suburban house with other people, it was cloudy outside, maybe early evening, and the bird landed with its claws on my shoulders and its head above mine, sort of like ...

(That's a falcon [above]. Horus, to be exact, resting upon Khafre. But you get the idea.)

Its claws were light and delicate, like a chickadee's. I said, "This bird is trying to tell me something," and I went into a meditative state, listening. Sadly, I received no message. Then the bird flew, manically, all around the room.

Thursday, September 27, 2007

trying to fit a small coloured drawing into an old frame no mount wrong side out placing small thin rectangles of paper cut from another coloured drawing in the corners to hold it unlikely tho in place in the frame son won't speak to daughter mother anxious about this I apply insights about anger waking haze thoughts of feminist afflicted artist biography movie seen last night
I was rollerblading with Matina Stamatakis. We were skating fast, twisting, twirling, doing tricks across many sidewalks, past much scenery. It all seemed so fun, even liberating--but then we suddenly ended up in a large medical facility so that I could get pills for my condition. My condition had something to do with headaches and I was uncomfortable with the doctor in some unspecified way, perhaps related to his vague familiarity. It seemed we had met before, but neither of us was willing to acknowledge this. 'Nice to meet you!' I exclaimed in an overly cheery tone after he handed me my bottle of pills. I looked at the bottom of the bottle and it said, 'HEAD VAGINA SORE'. I felt slightly embarrassed that my headaches were impacting my vagina.

Then I realized that there was a second, larger bottle of pills in my pocket. It was a huge bottle of Wellbutrin. Nobody had said anything about Wellbutrin, I wasn't even sure what Wellbutrin was, but I was pretty sure it was a psych drug and part of me was disturbed that they had yet again tried to push a psych drug on me, apparently by sneaking it into my pocket. Then I took a look at the Wellbutrin pills. They were parti-colored caplets--half white, half pink. They were prettier and more delicate and less menacing looking then I had expected and I thought I might try them, after all. But the next thing I knew they had turned into bundles of bus tokens that looked like paper bingo chips--white with pink print and pink perimeters. Matina was inserting these bus tokens into something that looked like a cross between a computer and a slot machine. Perhaps it was some sort of non-traditional ATM. I'm not sure why we needed to use bus tokens to get home when we had rollerbladed there.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

I am at a poetry event held in a combination city park and Juliana and Bill and Charles’ living room. The feeling sensation of the social space is that of an isolated figure in a cafe in a novel by Jean Rhys. A moment of confusion during the third act (music): the self-service bar behind the stage has become connected to the sound system. The bar consists of two garden hoses hanging over a table, operated with spray nozzles. (generic party movie, alternately, science fiction) One tube dispenses beer, the other vodka and water. The singer is screaming with a lot of care and effort into the microphone, and we can see and also hear the overall gist (radio) of this performance, but at a greatly diminished rate. Two poets are arguing loudly at the bar. We listen. The problem is that the bar-tubes have run empty. I offer my glass of water in a really imperious, judgemental way.

Afterwards, in a collective movement down the hill, everyone goes for a run around the lake but Suzanne and I are trying instead to get an appointment to have our hair cut at the same time. She is on the phone with the hair person and I am trying to take a photo of the halo around a streetlamp. I depress the button and there’s a click but it doesn’t actually take pictures, I keep seeing the viewscreen. Meanwhile, we are reviled and shamed by the hair person for trying to do something so crass as make a simultaneous appointment, and we return to my apartment. It is very bare; mostly there is a twin bed with a thin blanket, the color of GRUEL. (The Little Princess) There is a pile of discarded party clothes in one corner of the room, and my two cats are using this as a nest. They are having a kind of fit, meowing and pouncing and clawing at the green and yellow.. uh .. taffeta. The fabric is very dirty.

We go to play with the cats. My oldest cat has the face of a very old dog, he looks like a sick lhasa apso with big dark eyes rimmed by goo. I think my cat needs to go to the groomers. Then I realize a lot of his hair has fallen and is even still falling out. He has the kind of long fine skinny hair-fringe that a very bald man has when only a few strands of hair remain. And then I see how red his skin is, and greasy, and covered in scabs, and that my cat is very sick. He rolls onto his back and with every movement another fold of skin unfolds, each more hairless and uncomfortable than the next. I am rubbing his tummy and apologizing and crying and he is crying too, with the eyes and tears of a human man but a dog’s mouth, and I am trying to smooth his skin and am vigorously rubbing where it hurts and I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. More hair falls out. This scene passes and I am standing in front of the sink holding my hands in front of myself, preparing to wash them. I am trying to keep them away from the rest of my body. They are covered in dirt and hair and dried blood and flakes of skin. My cat (dog, man, part) is whimpering on the floor. Suzanne is standing somewhere behind me but I am too ashamed for anyone to see this and I wake up.

Monday, September 24, 2007

I dreamt that we were in the snow. The snow looked like the tundra. My sister was there and was looking at me from inside the snow circle near the house. She was knitting or mending. Pierre Joris was standing in open snow, wearing a parka, and the fur ruff on his hood made him look sincere. I told my sister, “That's Pierre Joris. He's a poet.” “Oh,” she said. Then Pierre came to talk to me. He had a collection of record albums indoors; we went inside to search the records and see the equipment. The phone rang. A freelance client named Matthew, who had unwillingly given up a chance to work with me to a man named Clay, was calling to warn me that Clay had ripped up a plastic milk jug in the house they rented, while claiming the jug was me. When I got off the phone, I wanted to play my “Sound Experiment” for Pierre, knowing he might like it if it were played properly with the right equipment, but it didn't seem possible: a French feminist in a caftan had come into the room and was applying cream to her elbows. She ordered the equipment. Pierre said to me, “I'm horny.” “I can read French," I told him. "If you heard my French, you would laugh.” My sister stayed outside near the snow circle mending.

Sunday, September 23, 2007

Last night I had a lucid dream. I dream I am in a school and in the moment of realizing i'm dreaming, i see a man and i want to touch him to see if my hand will go through him, since we're in a dream. i ask him if i can touch his hand, and i do, and its warm, and fleshy like a real hand! which amazes me and makes me laugh. he looks at me confused, and i just walk away. i see out the window: since i'm dreaming, can I teleport to that grassy lawn over there? No, somehow knowing I was dreaming brought with it the limitations of the physics of waking life.But I was totally fearless and looked for a long time into the eyes of an older man, a teacher, to see if he knew it was a dream, but i could tell after a while that he didn't know, and also, i could see, somehow, his...ethical, his moral limitations, his closed off ness, and i was a little bit disappointed that i couldn't share in the experience of knowing it was a dream we were in. next to him was another woman, also a teacher, i said to her, smiling: "we're in a dream...how are we going to wake up?" and she and the man next to her looked at me like I was crazy. we were at a school next to a small lake with grassy green hills...I was walking around looking into peoples eyes trying to ascertain who knew it was a dream, if anyone did, but no one did, and i was feeling fearless joy of dream gnosis in my heart, but longing to meet someone else who knew. Then a younger college guy wanted to be my lover and I was walking with him, his also younger girlfriend appeared and i said is that your boyfriend? And she said yes. I said, you two are beautiful together, and she grabbed him by the hand and pulled him away and he tried to take my hand to take me with them and I broke away from him and lightly pushed him, waved him away, shooed him off, gesturing to him to go with her...it was easy and amusing...at some point i became thirsty, seeing a water fountain and saying, hmm. i wonder. I'll try but i doubt it will work. so i drink from the water fountain and of course, it doesn't quench my thirst b/c its dream water. so I think, should I wake up and drink some of the water next to my bed?

Friday, September 21, 2007

Each spot (lesion) has a hard, knobby miniature object shaped like a barbell inside, which I can trace/feel through the skin, and which causes the skin to be distended. I have an infinite amount of these hard pockets-flaps on my torso and legs and shoulders and back, and when I take a bath they float away from my body slightly, and become translucent (jellyfish). In the bath, when each pocket lifts up and away from the skin, it’s like being covered in grasses, in the water I’m a field, i.e. the kind that would be on a bluff, overlooking the sea. But when I am not in the bath, they are hard, and I can’t tell if they are inserted (plastic) or not. These bulbous growths. I struggle against the thought that only surgery can remove the alien barbells from my skin, and yet I know it’s true. During this time I am in an isolated house with a man who still wants to have sex with me.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Last night: dreamt that I had a golden retriever and went back to school for an MBA.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Last night I had nightmares. One involved moving to Michigan. I was unhappy in Michigan.

Saturday, September 15, 2007

I’m having a whole series of strange, disjointed dreams this past week. I almost said ‘enjoying’, and would have if the cumulative effect wasn’t enervating and, very slightly, disorientating.

For one thing, I’m always younger in my dreams and it’s awfully good to be striding through fields and forests rather than shuffling along looking for safe points to lodge my stick. And it’s certainly the only way I get to walk up a mountain.

It’s a combination of inactivity and unsuitable diet, I suspect. No great issue. It’ll pass, and the only reason I record it is because that’s what I do. Record things.

Monday, September 10, 2007

Walking through Los Angeles, a seedy outlying tract more like old Brooklyn or Chicago, vacant lots stretching out, rare buildings. One of them in a building all by itself, like the last house left standing from a row of attached houses, is an old bookstore: in the window are ranged impressive sets of leather-bound volumes: one multi-volume set "The Flora of New Guinea." I call out to Ted Enslin who is walking with us, and prompt him to look in the window. We are astonished at that set -- of course the store is closed.

Thursday, September 6, 2007

I insist that my father get credit for the glass face of the sun. It was his idea. Two young men stand near a work of art they claim is theirs, but I know it belongs to my father. Sure he didn't make it, but they followed his plans. The glass face of the sun glares up at the real sun. It measures the time. The lips are pink. I tell the men a brass plate inscribed with my father's name and a line about his inspiration will do just fine. They can't unveil it until he gets his due.It was my father's idea – the sun.
1.

I am in a large mansion. Many people who might be poets I've read are there. I once thought I saw Walt Whitman working as an orderly in a Minneapolis hospital while getting stitches in my head by David Copperfield, the magician. This mansion has a large ballroom, as all mansions do where all of these people are gathered. I am in a back room, being encouraged to urinate into a bookbag. With my penis drawn, I relieve myself into this bookbag.

Fortunately, I woke up dry.

2. Read 'No Exit'? My friend Juli and I are in a hotel room with a large window to one side. Actually, it might not be a hotel room at all. It's just a room with a door, two armchairs, and a large window. The color of the room is salmon/pink. There is a greenish trim. It looks like someplace old people go to die. Juli is standing in the center of the room as I sit in the chair. She is heavy bored. She suggests a party. I tell her we have no provisions, nor do we have anyone to invite. She suggests sleep. I tell her there is no where to lay down and I refuse to sleep in the suit I have on and refuse to be naked around her. Visibly upset, Juli suggests breaking the window to get out. I tell her there is no where to go outside the window: it is an illusion. She sits down in her chair, and I suggest we listen to some music. She informs me there is no music.

3.

Johannes Goransson and I are in a cave not enclosed on both sides. Just rock that comes over a small space with a stream that runs through the middle. There are fish in the stream and we are hungry. Johannes takes his flashlight and begins tying leaves together in order to fish with the new pole. Waiting, I imagine a new scenario. Suddenly, I grab the flashlight and start beating at the fish in the shallow stream. Soon, we are feasting on the raw fish, still withering between our teeth.

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

A large snake and a primordial dwarf were playing in the same bowl, supervised by the dwarf's parents, who were looking on in amusement. Afer what was initially perceived as a playful tussle between snake and dwarf, the dwarf was suddenly gone--and it was realized that the snake had swallowed the dwarf whole. One of the adults picked up the snake, stretched open its mouth and peered inside, and called to the dwarf. No response. Someone had a brief thought about cutting the snake open to retrieve the primordial dwarf from within, but that idea was decided against. Instead, the snake was returned to its bowl, beside which a dog dish filled with water and a large dog biscuit were placed, in the hopes that these items would lure the primordial dwarf from his new womb.

Monday, September 3, 2007

In a park with a gazebo, perhaps the day after a county fair, with hay scattered among trampled grass, I was trying desperately -- to the point of tears -- to convince two girls selling cheeseburgers out of a paper bag, to sell me three cheeseburgers for my schizophrenic brother who had locked himself in the gazebo & had been there all night in an "episode." knew that my brother needed three cheeseburgers in order to regain control, but the girls said that he didn't need three, that he only needed two, & they were strict in their refusal. My brother's face had disappeared. His torso was turned facing me at times, but his face was gone, as if rubbed out. I was screaming, flailing at the girls for three cheeseburgers. They eventually ran away.