More Dreams & Fantasies

                       The Skirt Was A Tip-Off

They needed me there to do something,

but I had to go somewhere else first.

Things kept interfering with my ability to leave the house,

but as I was finally going out the door

and down the steps and the little hill to the car,

I was having trouble getting the largish button

through the threadbare buttonhole

down around my lower belly above the zip,

and as I swung the belt-line around to get a better angle on it,

I realised that I was wearing a frayed, khaki-coloured skirt.

So I told the man who’d just stepped out

of the medium-sized white van with black markings

to deliver legal documents

in regard to long-term child abusers,

“Hey! I’m wearing a skirt. This must be a dream.”

And it was.

So I woke up,

had a drink of water from the plastic juice jar on my headboard,

and went to the loo.

                     Hanging On

I was behind the wheel of some car,

sitting in the driver’s seat –

not reaching over it from the back seat

like the time before;

managing it along the narrow road

was a piece of cake,

even though I hadn’t driven for years.

They say that driving is like fucking –

once you’ve done it you never forget how.

I don’t know who they are,

but I can think of some significant differences

between driving and fucking, myself,

so it’s safe to say that they’re not exactly alike.

I had to dismiss this from my mind, though,

as the road started to break up

alongside a flooded riverbank,

confronting me with treacherous potholes and boulders,

especially after it rose up again into the hills,

where it turned into little more than an obstacle-course track

before disappearing entirely.

I pulled off into a gravel scenic lookout,

and found a place to park beside a cliff wall,

which made climbing out of the car hard,

but not impossible,

despite you parking right beside me on the other side,

whoever you were.

The rising river began to cut off

the irregular oval of our parking area,

but I knew I was all right

because you were there,

whoever you are.

                        A Preference

A woman kissed me in a dream last night.

I can’t remember who she was or what she looked like,

although I do recall that her face was round.

A woman kissed me in a dream last night.

She’d come up and sat beside me

on a sofa in a room filled with people,

put one arm around my shoulders, and just did it.

A woman kissed me in a dream last night.

As I recall it made me feel worthwhile

and also as if I belonged.

A woman kissed me in a dream last night.

It felt exceedingly pleasant,

and despite myself I became aroused.

A woman kissed me in a dream last night,

and when some of the people who were in the dream

made rude comments about our age difference,

something of which I was unaware,

she just shot back that she just didn’t care.

A woman kissed me in a dream last night,

but then I couldn’t find my shoes,

as sometimes happens in dreams,

and soon I had to get up to pee.

I never did get back to sleep

after that,

and eventually gave it away, made the bed,

and stumbled into another dismal day,

of course devoid of kisses,

as have all of them for years.

It’s no wonder I prefer sleeping to being awake.

              Oneiric

He dreamt of the ordinary –

something much to be desired,

but never attained.

                       Red Brick Transit Nightmare

It was like the time before, and, like the time before,

I couldn’t explain it.

There I was, driving my tiny car faster than I felt safe,

north through the night on the Industrial Highway’s middle lane,

surrounded on all sides by gigantic semi-trailer articulated trucks

tailgating each other and me, engine-braking and belching diesel smoke,

rumbling loudly way over the speed limit,

crowding me so tightly that my hands cramped on the steering wheel,

allowing almost no view of the night sky.

On either side of the highway giant four-storey factories,

their windows lighted against the night,

clanged and hissed and thumped and throbbed with production,

somehow having remained in place,

avoiding relocation to Asia,

their smokestacks spewing doom

into the already-black sky.

To escape the overbearing sense

of restriction and repression

I managed to exit the highway,

like the time before, and, like the time before,

to cross under a thundering six-track railway overpass

into a town of mostly red-brick structures,

most of them at least a hundred, maybe two hundred years old;

the redness of their bricks was grimed with soot,

as were the giant, ancient, leafless-winter trees along the road.

Metallic spray-painted tags expressing mindless egotism

covered the side-barriers of the overpass

and the trunks of the trees,

this exercise in personal narcissism and ugliness

perhaps providing the local young people

with the delusion that their existence

wasn’t bleak and hideously hopeless.

                        Architecture Dreams

Since childhood

some of my favourite dreams

have been about houses and buildings and structures.

Many have come repeatedly

in subtly varying forms,

making them familiar and usually welcome.

In one I’m in a mansion –

sometimes three stories, sometimes five –

with a major central switchback stairway,

rooms both large and small,

and numerous enclosed porches

looking out over a residential street.

Sometimes I live there,

sometimes I used to and now others do.

Another’s a sprawling, one-storey,

putatively modern residence

with sliding walls that continually change the floor plan.

A small studio apartment,

one of many up a flight of stairs

in a run-down two-storey building,

with the landlord living downstairs,

located where a street curves at the top of a hill

has also appeared often;

I’m fairly certain it’s in Southern California.

Further downmarket is the hole,

underneath some structure or other,

lined sometimes with rugs,

and with a dug-out entranceway

out of which I observe

a degenerate, disintegrating urban environment

entirely alone.

              Dressing For Dinner

It was a matter of standards.

The family dressed for dinner every evening

at the magnificent mahogany table

that Father’s great-great-grandfather

had brought back from Barbados

as a souvenir of the sugar trade.

The china was from the same period,

eighteenth-century Royal Worcester,

but the silver was much older.

The family’s prosperity,

although augmented by slaves and sugar,

prudent passive investments,

and then, between and after the wars,

active banking and finance,

did not have its sources in vulgar commerce,

but in land-holdings won

by the axe and the broadsword.

Dinner conversation focused on the weighty affairs of the day.

Liveried footmen in black and teal stood behind each diner

to assure that each course was served properly.

Chef had trained in France but knew

good English and Irish cooking as well.

The eldest son, who enjoyed how he looked in white tie,

had become something of a whizz

at rapid algorithmic trading in derivatives,

as well as at one-day eventing.

The second-youngest daughter

dreamed through these dinners about a life in leotards

in studios finished in distressed brick,

stretching the limits of experimental dance

with her wild-haired and smooth-muscled Ukrainian lover,

and so ignored the weighty dinner discussions.

It was a matter of standards.

        Desks

A recurring dream:

I find myself going

from office to office –

different businesses,

different agencies,

a newspaper –

and everywhere I find myself

I have a desk

piled high with

sundry dream-crap,

but I have

no work,

or if I do,

I don’t know what it is.

Afraid of being fired,

I get up and go out,

telling them

I’ll be right back,

but I just go

to another desk.

Everybody else

in each office

is busy

or eating

or doing something else

purposeful.

                                 Passing Through

Looking for work or love or something like that,

he went along with a sculptor who’d claimed his friendship

to the screen door at the back of the house,

one of a long block of old stucco two-storey houses with front balconies,

some luxurious, some faded, some crumbling,

some subdivided into numerous small

one-or-two room rental units sharing plumbing,

their week’s rubbish awaiting kerbside collection out front

behind an avenue of enormous purple-blossomed trees,

their branches from both sides of the street meeting over the roadway.

The screen door opened directly into the kitchen,

in which most of the surfaces were unpainted maple,

where his new friend’s mother,

her mousy-brown hair tied back loosely

with loose strands hanging and flopping by the sides of her face,

stared fixedly, her eyes focused on a scene from a sexless holiday

in the Cook Islands many years before:

the shade from the palm trees reaching almost to the petanque court,

the view set as a still photograph in her mind.

He told her to take it easy; he’d brought provisions,

and proceeded prepare squooshy overcooked egg noodles

in a sauce of butter, sour cream, cream cheese, and cottage cheese,

with dabs of vanilla extract and Tabasco sauce,

and bottled french dressing covering canned asparagus on the side.

She and her son, meanwhile, entertained him

with detailed descriptions of World-War-II-era warships

of all countries, combatant and otherwise.

After dinner they showed him their collection of tin-alloy miniatures.

He stepped outside for a smoke

and wondered about the details of the neighbours’ dreams and drudgery,

and of those in the world beyond the world

of the purple tunnel just past

the black rubbish bags at his feet.