I had a dream about my dead dad. I don't have them often. Years back, just after the accident, he'd be in them a lot - always retarded - with big retarded eyes that were all puffy, loose, and wet. Like sunken donuts. Or he'd just be physically handicapped - a paraplegic, a torso stump. Wiggling. Anyway, he wasn't normal, never smiling, never walking into the expanse of a wet golden pond, whispering: "It's okay and I'm alright. Godspeed to you my boy."
Perhaps goodbyes are too ugly for that. And so the veracity of ugly has made these dreams.
•
It is quarter to midnight. Autumn is tucked away by a sheet of black absence. You can smell the dead leaves but can't see them. The fall colors on the trees hang up there, missing. Crickets scratch their bodies, exploding through their tiny frames into a chorus of familiarity. And all is right with nature and sound.
Inside, the room bores. Moth balls blow odor from the closet. The bed sheets are ruffled; dark spots looming in the folds. The ceiling is plaster and the roof has shingles. And I am not one to feel magic that much.
Rather, I am in bed and my head hurts. It is heavy. It hurts from tiredness and trying. I often feel sick and I don't know why. I think maybe I think too much. But then I think about thinking. I think about my desire to feel - always carving, hallowing, until my body is a horn of a million gutless voices. But it's not all bad, though - this piss hole of a mind - because it allows me to get a good night sleep. You see, by midnight I'm like a boxer in the 15th round and my black eyes are my glory. The ache is good. And so I rest, sleep. And then I dream.
The last week for some reason they've been real vivid. They've been those dreams where you can smell, taste, and shit. Those dreams where I'm digging up holes and my arms move in bed. In fact, the body doesn't care that your mind pretends. It feels the reality accordingly - sweating as a plane breaks into red after crashing, suspiciously aroused as two midget old women grow younger the more they make love, softening as a girl in brown hair compresses wet clouds into her lap.
But it's a pisser, because I can never see the proof of my own bridging while sleeping. The sweat's there, beading, or the boner, or softness, or artifacts of impact from moving my arms and knocking the walls, but the impossible is gone. Replaced by the bedroom - it's normalness and dark. Its red alarm clock. And that's why I've always wanted to see myself dreaming, or of doing the impossible - being awake while I sleep. Because then I'd be onto something. No! More than that. It would be proof about something: a proof that my body is tied to more than its flesh, if only because it acts accordingly - as it is light when I fly, and blood-rapid when I throw a man a mile for making the mistake of kissing my wife, and calmed as I walk on water. Maybe this way, I'd finally know my flesh is more then the fact of excretions, but rather connected to the million and half dead feeding juice up to my sleep.
•
Instead I wake up. And it is Tuesday and it's work - shower, feces, and shaving. Radio voices playing tricks through their throats. And though the fall colors through the windshield shake out pretty in the breeze, I can't help the feeling that Here We Go Again. Another wasted day and some more yuck out of my mouth.
Maybe I'm just not prepared when I wake up, if only because the world never sleeps, and then it becomes like trying to join a race with my eyes in slits and my warm-ups on. And before you know it, everything is out ahead of me: the birds chirping and it shouldn't but it does so - hurting. The tree colors too bright for the eye in my body. And thus I'm losing again. So perhaps it's no damn surprise that I go to work and don't like it: paper clips and staples and sex not on the beach. The sun shining through the blinds and faking it - it explodes into whistles just before dusk.
•
Things get better, however, as things get darker. There's less pressure to meet the beginning accordingly.
•
I leave work. The colors in the trees are ashy from shadows. The birds are flying - duct tape on the beak. I get home. My wife's in the kitchen making brownies. She's having her pudding without having her meat. This comforts me. It makes me smile. But sadly it's not only her but the coming of dreaming, because it is mostly while awake that I pretend to care less.
•
It wasn't always like this. No. It used to be different. In fact I hated sleep as a kid and couldn't wait for the dark to be eaten from the horizon on up. And when it did I'd be spreading sideways with the day - the morning growing me eager to fill on life's eventualities. Of course that was back when I didn't need dreams to scream into. Now I do. And so now I wake up wondering, desperate to put the tears of my sleep back into my eyes so they can fall down the face I come to in the morning - or perhaps more importantly, the one that leads me to back into night.
•
It's quarter to midnight. Outside, the stars shine. The moon over Lake Erie sings a quiet little song. Autumn is tucked away, sleeping. Beside me, my wife is both lovely and warm. She sleeps. Her eyes twitch. She must be dreaming.
I lay down. Look up. Below are the crickets. Below that: the mud. Atop our bed is our body. And then comes the roof. Above that, the sky grows deep, over us and in us. So I close my eyes, cry - for once passing the stars to wish upon its space.
•
I had a dream about my dead dad. In it, he was dying.
END
