Nightmare

In a nightmare it occurs to me
That I can become the scary thing myself

So I make myself light,
Float up somewhere near the ceiling,
And shriek high and loud

My victims get out of bed, terrified
And run through hallways in their nightgowns
Stumbling against the walls

I don’t actually mean to scare
I never wanted to be a scary thing
I just wanted to not be scared myself

So I try to float down from the ceiling
To tell my victims it’s okay
It’s just me and I’m not scary

But all that comes out is a shriek
And that’s when the nightmare
Became truly scary

July 19, 2021 at 11:18PM

I like the night

I like the night. It is dark, quiet, and mostly made up of nothing. My back hurts less when I am lying down. Unlike the day, there are no disappointments, fears, angers, or other irritations—because nothing is happening at night. The lights are off. The doors and windows are shut. Nobody else is here. This is as close as you can get to the land before time, the land before anything. The night can be nothing, if you let it. That is, until you start to dream or otherwise create something with your own mind on the black canvas of the night. Even then, you are not limited by the rules of reality that afflict the day. The day can only be so much. The night can choose to either be nothing or anything. The day can only be something, and that something just is what it is. In the night you can choose. If you’re sick of it all, you can rest in the nothingness. If you want something more, you can dream it up. I do start to miss the day eventually. I want it to be real. Even if I can’t choose, it’s worth giving up some freedom of choice just to be a part of the real thing, especially being with others who are real and not just figments. The best mornings or the ones when I have started to miss the day as much as I can and that’s right when I open my eyes to see the morning sun peeking in through the drapes.

Nighttime nothing

It’s when I get into the nighttime nothing that I can’t remember a single thing about the day and the things I planned nothing really means anything in the night unable to see in the dark dreaming up free dreams as many as you could ever want with no cost of admission and no need to make money to pay for them after the sun has set there’s a brief time when the mind starts to wonder if it will ever rise again and somehow thinking that it might not nothing is off-limits as if it were really your last night to live and nothing seems impossible but you have to hurry while this feeling lasts because as the sun starts to rise and the sky brightens you will be sure that there is another day to come.

Originally written on: March 8, 2021

Angels and demons

God I got scared last night which makes no sense this morning with all the lights on drinking coffee excited to see all of the details of the room and listen to music later I can’t listen to lyrics when I write but like to listen in the early afternoon once I’m done anyway last night I was lying there in bed and woke up feeling a pulsing in my feet I couldn’t decide if it was just my blood pumping because of the way that I had my legs crossed or if there was a little demon standing there at the bottom of the bed squeezing my toes with its claws I couldn’t see in the dark and even if the lights were on I don’t know if I would have had the courage to lean up and look I just lay there going back and forth in my mind trying to find any reasonable explanation at all for what it could be other than a demon down there the most uncanny part as I write this morning is how nonsensical it seems during the day with the lights on to have been so scared as I was but something about the non-physical dream world changes your perception of reality and the angels and the demons have all the power over you in that other world.

In the dark

I have not been up early or late enough lately. Only awake for the day, when it is light, and the whole rest of the world is awake with me, telling me what to do. It is in the dark where I used to find space to stretch out, but since setting my morning alarm, and getting to bed early enough to get a full eight hours, I have spent less time in the dark. That is where I used to find my inspiration. The dark is chaotic, but it is also creative and full of mysterious possibility. Whereas the light is clear for all to see—the title on your desk placard, the name on your name tag, the features of your face, the messiness of your apartment, the trash on the sidewalk—it can all be seen, accounted for, and set about the business of the day. But at night, all bets are off. God knows what people are doing. They should be asleep, and if not, then what? Where is the traffic cop to tell the hoodlums not to cross the road when the light is red? But there are no cars. Where is your boss to tell you to be at your desk during work hours? But the lights in the office are off and nobody is there. Where is the sun to say the day has started and it is time for you to be awake? But I am already awake, sun, I have beaten you to it. And the moon has told me what you would not. I will return in time, and when I do, I’ll have something new to show your day.

In between dreams and reality

Lying safe and alone, I am unindividuated and idle. My mind swims in the stream of dreams that is ever less loosely connected to experiences from my own lifetime. There are added elements from movies, books, and my own imagination, scenes I have only seen or heard about secondhand. I pass through these scenes, sometimes as myself, other times as someone else. Sometimes I am no one, I am only observing what transpires without participating myself. In this way, dreaming teaches me how not to be myself. Such that I awake surprised, when I find myself back within my own body and mind. At first, I feel contained. I feel that my wide-open dream perception has been narrowed into a limited point of view. I can still close my eyes and imagine, but it is less powerful, tethered to awareness of being in my own body, tied down by the constant reminders from my senses that I am connected to a singular body in a certain location in a physical world—hearing the traffic noise outside, feeling the bed beneath my back. I cannot lift off and separate as completely as I am allowed in the dream world. For one, there is less ability, but I also experience less need. I am not yet completely myself, in the groggy moment between dream and waking life, I have not fully remembered who I am. It would seem just as natural for me to close my eyes again and slip back into the dream world, if not for hunger or the need to get up and go to the bathroom. At the same time, I am happy, having returned to the land of the living, as I know it. Able again to say good morning and have breakfast and go about the work which I left unfinished last night.

Beyond skin

I wake up with my hand plugged into her heart like a battery. Her closed eyes staring past her eyelids innocently into the ethereal. My hand plunged deep into her chest in the dream world where skin is a permeable barrier. She breathes all the deeper, undisturbed. For a moment I feel as one with her not unlike the sexual encounter. It is as if we have both entered the dream world tethered together by skin. As if the dream world were a movie theater and we both handed the ticket man our ticket with the same seat number and proceeded into the movie theater to have the same dream at the same time and as the same person. I cannot feel where my fingertips touch her chest. It is like when your leg has fallen asleep and you can only feel above your knee. I can only feel above my elbow. The rest of my arm seems to be plunged into and past her body into the sleep world where my forearm and hand are cut off from physical sensation. My other hand cups her neck. We lay on our sides facing each other, an arm’s length apart, connected only by my two hands touching her, and some other link that goes beyond just skin.

City alarm

The city alarm is set

By the bus route

And the bakery man

Driving his truck of bread

And the other cars

Their wheels and engines

And occasional radios

And the street light

That never stops

Or maybe it’s the store light

Or traffic light

That always finds a way

Into your apartment

Despite your best efforts

To drape the windows dark

—The light and noise

Even here in San Francisco

Makes you believe what they say

About New York never sleeping

Breathing in the night

I breathe easy

In the night

On my back

Four fingers

Rest on my belly

Feeling it rise

And fall

A wrist

Props my head

Looking up

At the ceiling

A slightly

Different shade

Than the day

In the dark

And I just breathe

Bed sheet blind

Prose:

The metal rod that held up our blinds over the kitchen window broke yesterday. So I took a hammer and some nails and stood on one of the dining room chairs to nail a bed sheet to the top of the window frame to serve as a blind for the time being.

I went to bed and woke up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water. I opened the fridge and poured myself a cup of cold water from the pitcher. I was on my way back to the bedroom half-asleep when the bed sheet hanging over the kitchen window caught my eye.

I stood there, naked and drinking my water, and watched the headlights from traffic on the street outside passing through the grey bed sheet. They seemed like ghosts from an unfamiliar world. The lights were distorted beyond being able to discern that they were car headlights. It was like an abstract movie.

I started to make up stories about why certain ghost lights would come to stop and then go again. The fast lights were in a hurry to get somewhere. Some lights stopped next to each other and made love before moving on.

I stood there in the dark by myself and made up stories about the light movie on the bed sheet until I was almost fully awake. Then I went back to bed.

Poetry:

The metal rod

That held up our blinds

Over the window

In the kitchen

Broke yesterday

So I nailed up

A grey bedsheet

To cover the window

For the time being

I went to bed

And woke up to get some water

Then stood and watched

Naked and drinking water

The headlights from traffic

Passing through the grey bedsheet

Like ghosts

In an unfamiliar world

Day and night

The day teaches us to live. The night teaches us to die.

I wonder if the nights start to seem longer as you get older. As of now, I can’t tell a difference. The days seems to be about as long as the nights.

Some nights are longer, when I can’t sleep. Or when I sleep deeply and achieve a dream that seems to last a lifetime.

For those farther beyond their youth, I wonder if the nights grow longer. For fear that death grows near. That a night of nothing—no sound and all dark—is not all too different from death itself.

night time

Something clicks
In the night
Unnatural, interrupting
A sweet lullaby
Of silent sounds

A flash
From the bus claws
Catching on electric wires
Outside the window

I check the time
And realize
It is almost the hour
When the mechanical city
Will start its day

And this click and flash
Were the early signs
That I’ll have to wait
For another sun’s passing
For the peace and quiet
Of non-mechanical
Night time

up at night

Up, I am up now

As surely as I said

I would sleep

Through the night

I am up now

Having failed

To fight off thoughts

That couldn’t wait

Until the morning

I stopped to ponder

Dangerously a dream

That, if left unconsidered,

Would have passed through

Perfectly in peace

To go on its way

In and out

Through each ear canal

Yet it was something

Shocking enough to stir

And once my woken mind

Got a hold

And seized it

Somewhere in the middle

Still in my mind

The gears start to turn

And the whole factory

Follows suit

Coming to life

In the middle of the night

silent sheet

I put my ear

To the sheets

And listen

To the silent rustle

That says shh

All else

Is outside

Nonsense

And absurd

Far away

From here

Writing my dreams

A daytime nap

Marries the motion

And light

Of the waking world

With the wonder

And formlessness

Of dream

Wherein the middle

Poetry lives

Dancing

Back and forth

In wheelbarrows

Full of dream

Dug up in sleep

And delivered

To be re-planted

Here in my bed

Brain tree

Putting down roots

Grinding my teeth

Clenching my jaw

Unaware until

My bottom teeth

Meet the top row

Mashing

Like corn in a mortar

To dust, powder

Eventually

But not so soon

More slowly wearing

Waking me

In the night

With yet another

Symptom

Of my anxiety

Nightime stroll

I go for a walk

At night

Slowly

Strolling

And see

So many things

That I miss

On my walk

To work

Rushing

In the morning

Whatever waxes

I reckless write

What comes at night

Waking lately

Makes me wobble

Whatever waxes

Wanes tomorrow

When I one time

See for three

So I learned to

Sleep with ease

More sleep night stuff

Dark as night

Except for sun

So when to wake

Is clear as day

Not for nocturnal

Lights at night

Never sleeping

Up early to find

Sleepy nighters

Still stumbling

Soon to bed

In the daylight

Not right

The steak I ate too late

I wake up in the middle of the night, I think because of the steak I ate too late before bed. I have this energy now, as I digest, keeping me up. At first I am annoyed, wanting to get back to sleep. But then I think, I might as well take advantage of this energy and spend some time waking now, and then surely tiredness will come again, once I’ve digested and used up the energy.

last night

i feel like

an impostor

with

the up-for-work crowd

like i slept

last night

though i was

in the warehouse

eyes closed

trying to keep

my balance

in a different

kind of crowd

dead quiet night in the city

in the dead quiet

of the night

i feel so awake

and out of place

while everything else

is so dead

and there’s nothing

not even

the neighbors

to talk

or the cars outside

to go by