MORNING
We come from within.
You probably wonder what's inside the box.
I hear voices, as if a whole town is waking up.
It's as if people are living right now
and we can't see them. Nothing is now
left remarkable beneath the full moon.
I'm missing the best moments of my life.
Going out early today going shopping at
Trader Joe's. A motorcycle cop sitting on
his motorcycle in the middle of the intersection
at Van Ness & McAllister. Looking forcefully
assured, quietly watching all around him.
Alert within all that uniformed carapace protection
and gear: "Is something going on?"
"Movie"
Where is your attention? What's it focused on.
Counting the flock of tourists ambling in a non-
sinister manner being guided down McAllister by
the "man in the hat" who points out the famous sites
of the City, where the famous fictional characters
lived, where the bodies are hidden, where dreams are made.
When "movies" are made in the neighborhood you can't
tell the actors from the denizens. The woman in black
may be an "extra"; the boy in the baseball suit: a boy
in a baseball suit; the tall athletic man walking slowly with
a dog may be next year's "hot item" in People Magazine; that
gray-haired lady may be simply worried about her heroin son.
Typically, when "movies are being made" on the street not
a lot of action happens. For hours. Makes you wonder:
all that money, all that equipment, all those people,
nothing happening until you really "See It" on the big
screen; magic makers working in another dimension. No
reason to hurry when what I don't see now will be
available for viewing on DVD in three years; time
measured in dramatic lighting, crisp dialogue and peopled
with beautiful body-types, wearing make-up to make them
look just like the people watching them making a movie;
this very minute, without delay a mad impulse passes
through me: run up the street, offer-up your life to the Movies!
The bus ride to Trader Joe's went smoothly, uneventfully,
simply. I remembered a vivid dream I had last night.
I don't normally give a second thought to "dreams". I'm
not one to read things into nocturnal visualizations. I
do marvel that dreams in fact "happen"; do acknowledge it
may be the brain's way of releasing emotional left-overs,
channeling physical tension into a mélange of mental stew;
the lurking memories flashing on our internal movie screen,
but this dream had the air of: the journey's end, the
undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns,
an awfully big adventure: running, I am here. I am light and
weightlessly wonderful. free. alert; running, almost flying
along rain slick streets, with weather as real as real
can be, as sensual as here and now and thinking to myself:
my god! if you don't wake up you'll be dead; yikes!
a quick-shiv to the gut kinda nightmare. didn't see it coming.
shocked. and then I asked myself: how does one respond
and live through life shocks without being torn apart molecularly.
I didn't mind investigating a new emotional experience:
being free; what woke me was the fear I'd not completed "something";
I'd be leaving a body behind. Not that I minded "leaving"
my body. I didn't want to be "handled" or "disposed of"
after the exiting; the fear of being touched occurred to me, the
"leaving a mess" for others; when I began to analyze I
felt the unknown emotional jolt fading and realized
I was not laughing. That this was an audition seemed
impression enough for one morning's dream recall.
I love shopping at Trader Joe's. They have everything a
single person needs to subsist. Fresh food in just the
right-sized sexy-buy-me containers. TJ fair trade Bolivian,
spinach potato frittata, spaghetti & beef meatballs, sliced
oven roast turkey, turkey seasoned meatballs, radishes, hothouse
cucumber, butter Irish Kerrygold salted, albacore tune in olive
oil, granny smith apples, one daily niacin, peaches, baby royal gala apples,
is that you? is that how you’re gonna live? my life is afflicted with
incertitude; my nature starts from facts and actualities which it takes
for real; it is pushed beyond them into a pursuit of uncertain possibilities
and led eventually to question all that it took as real. I proceed from a
fundamental ignorance and hold no assured truth; all the truths on
which I rely for a time are found to be partial, incomplete and questionable:
I am happy, joyful, on top of the world, tickled pink, carefree or cheery
I am content, then low-spirited, dejected, melancholy, inconsolably sad.
Chat with the check-out clerk: two bags please, balanced. I’ll be
on the bus. I know what you mean I take the 27 it’s usually so full.
the 43’s pretty good but you can never be sure. thanks. thanks.
NIGHT
the moon’s huge tonight: looks like a movie FX; painful
bold white bone-glow close so close reach out beach ball bright
through the Venetian blinds. San Francisco City Hall dome
glowing in the late summer Saturday nightness in a city out dancing
and that huge transient unhappy tramp moon share the same window:
sisters of roundness, brothers of possibility, tango partners.
DREAM FLECK
seed of everything, mother far down the road, personal experience,
I have brought medicines, suffocated, gleaming, hiding, unquiet,
touch me, sweat soaked hair of my armpits, a flying train, am I praying,
I go near her, she who gave birth to me, I’m sad. her eyes, who’s
close to death, I am alone, she watches me, she’s gleaming, she’s hiding,
she’s sleeping in a lullaby, at summer’s end, the last days, what should I do.
I’m sure there’s a movie I could watch. A movie explaining to me what
I am to feel or will feel or want to feel; a visual jolt, a subliminal music:
so it is with everything, a means of escape: enter the body of the Sun.
-- Jeff Wietor
