30 XI 2002 - 15:15 - verba40

Alchera again -- my final one for the month. I finally got around to writing the Scrabble piece I played so long ago. Time is weighing heavily on my hands this afternoon and my creativity has crumpled under its weight. My usual readers are off somewhere having a life and as a result this is unfeedbacked for coherence. Please excuse that. [Added at 4:30 -- after I reread, must add this: forgive me for drastic abandonment of 'show, don't tell' principle. What happened to me? Not that I was that good at it before, but honestly. I blush in shame.] Must run and -- oh look, homework! Where'd that come from?

Words used: goo, tax, it, van, jodhpurs, roiled, emit, beg, easel, noon, harem, roc, ire, weld, joy, lark, rut, ox, bed, wanton, figs, trains, slit, nones, pie, queer, fin, neap, die, vied, lug, rim, yaw, die, ice. Letters unused: Y, V, Z (one each). Y'all note I was good and didn't do the nautical-mythological-whorehouse theme, right?

Fiction/Nonfiction. Or, better, 'half-fiction.' I'm wishy-washy. Get used to it. Tentative title: dreamstates. Go.

Dreams for me are snapshots and alternatives, in sharp flavors like figs marinated in vinegar, with dull and piercing colors used indiscriminately. There's no sense-reason to go through a night's worth -- they're not particularly connected to one another -- but it fits nicely, a neat chronology-package.

Perhaps this first dream is a past face for San Francisco -- in this world, we're still a port city. The city fathers may or may not have dredged the port and wisely prepared themselves for the departure of the banks' headquarters, but in any case the ships (smaller ones, then?) are still coming in and the waters of the Bay are still roiled by their wake, or whatever it is that ships make their wake with. The shiny black van doesn't bring the COIT carpet cleaners but instead a group of leathermen improbably clad by my subconscious in jodhpurs. Perhaps they're going to the stables in the park after this, or perhaps my dreamscape really doesn't know what it's doing. Perhaps it doesn't care. I walk down the street. At high noon there is almost no one. It's eerie, and the faint sounds of the Pt. Bonita foghorn carrying across the bay heighten the sense that everything is too still, too stagnant. If I were to check the political archives of the history there would be no pie in mayors' faces, everything is too quiet, too wrong, for that. There is some constancy left in my dreams. You appear behind me, startle me. I jump, and perhaps I emit a squeak. We stand there looking at each other for a moment, trying to size the other up, trying to communicate an incoherent need while maintaining any sort of strength in ourselves. I try not to beg for your presence but when you take me by the hand and we walk by the easel of the lone street-artist by the wharf (less for the tourists, if the city is grittier, than as a token, something every city must have) I almost want to cry. The dream fades to black.

North Beach. A variety of brick-red buildings boast that their harems contain the best -- what's the euphemism of choice? -- 'companions.' Some things don't change, and that includes the licentiousness of any coast city. We look at each other for a moment and the same mischief rises in our eyes. You pull out your tools (handy for just an occasion?) and begin to weld a few of the signs together. A few of the proprietors run out at the noise and begin to chase us, hurling invective at the top of their lungs and spitting, overcome by their ire. Any idea how much profit you've cost... The police don't care. There is such joy in walking into the sunset after an act of vandalism... we draw close to each other. In the distance, a roc wings its way back to its nest.

New scene. You're still sleeping when I get out of bed and look out the window. Evidently my eye has a wanton's disrepect for anachronism: I can see trains coming into the depot at the same time as an ox plows his way through his rut, evidently undisturbed by the lark that has settled on his back and is chirping for all he is worth. I've just a few minutes before the church-bell rings for nones and I lean in to wake you... your stubble burns fierce across my hand as you shake your head in denial of the world, opening your eyes just a slit until they match the way mine always are. No... you mumble into the pillow...

A queer feeling in the pit of my stomach and the fin breaking the surface of the water (dolphin or shark?) tell me we're on the Bay -- at neap tide, judging by the coastline. Don't ask me where my mind decides it has these knowledges, or why I seem to want to have vied with you to touch the rim of some projection on the boat while reaming as dry as possible. 'Watch the yaw,' you say, and I want to say, 'watch the yaw yourself, you big lug,' but I don't, because it would be contrived and would shatter the illusion of this afternoon, would tell me that this is not real and make your simulacrum die. Death will come soon enough to this dream without my hastening its arrival...

Your fingers are like ice as they rest in mine and somehow I know that both you and the night are about to die. Somehow (I underestimated you) you find the strength to talk about estate tax (what estate? I can hear you say it already), dying in a hut my reason tells me predates any such estate tax. Nothing shields you from the goo the rain is making of the adobe and I want to tell you what your eyes say you want to hear: that everything will be all right, that we'll stay together, that this dream will last and you will get well and remain hale to the end of days. But the one thing I cannot offer you is a clean death, because in the end the desire for union is unilateral, wholly from I who paint this dream -- and if I breathe a word of enosis to you the Turks will be upon us in a moment.