Day 9

 

People are starting to talk
about their dreams. Not literally.
I was under water with my hair on fire,
my Mom, now leopard, tried to eat me –
though some of that too.
 
Mostly it’s a form thing:
 

Are people’s dreams getting more vivid? Anyone else living a movie every night? Y’all dreaming so hard you wake up with a (hopefully)    non-Covid headache? 

And, most alarming to me:
 

are we speaking to each other through this?

Oh man.
The only thing worse than God
is first year Psychology.
I Wikipedia “collective unconscious”:
 

“A psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature, identical in everyone, which does not develop individually, but is inherited, and consists of pre-existent forms.”

 
(Emphasis mine)
 
Too God-like for me.
Though now 40, I still worry I’ll die,
and instead of the comforting black hole
I’ve taught myself to expect, they’ll be
a stupid Heaven’s Gate
with a literal St. Peter, frowning over his ledger:
 

… did you really, in eighth grade, stop slow dancing with Sarah H halfway through the song and leave her stark-faced on the neon-peppered gym floor? Says here you had the thought, when your friend died, ‘At least it’s an excuse not to work’. Why did you lie to partners and family and friends, and open up only late at night, to people you knew you’d never see again, and use them as a vault for your guilt?

And even if God’s ridiculous –
which I really hope – there’s still the problem
of energy. How the band walks into the bar
and knows how the show will go
by some enigma in the countertops.
How Rae and I house sat for that couple
and couldn’t fall asleep in their soft, beautiful bed,
then one month later they were filing their goodbyes
in court.
 
I mean, if this energy – this phenomenon, this ineffable
passing of spirit – is real, it makes sense it’d be
off the charts right now. There’s too much of us
in our rooms. The walls can only contain us so long.
The energy will find a way. Snake down drains,
up pipes, out into the street, zip through any old,
open door, dip and swirl around some stranger’s
living room, begging for the attention
of people, who, even trapped, don’t listen,
busy with Netflix or cooking or trying to get their teenager
to speak – our spirit, our energy, our –
 

and are these even the words? How, armed in my most unreadable face, you still know I need a hug? Instinct, intuition, impulse, inclination – yeah, yeah, yeah, but it’s more, right? I’m talking about magic. Being in communion without thought or word. The electric, all-knowing transcendence of it.             Anyways –

 
this ‘spirit’, or whatever,
lies in wait for the stranger to collapse
into bed, finally shut off their fucking phone,
and it (we? some part of the I? the us?)
rappel from the ceiling like some spiritual
Tom Cruise spy movie, spread along their body,
seep into their numbed mind, now finally
open and clear –
 
and, at last, in all the clutter of the world,
it (we? me? us?) finally finds a field
we can play in
together.
 
                                   

(And how can I hate this?

The whole world’s changed. The city’s a hole, capitalism isn’t even a thing anymore – but God forbid we dream weird. That there’s something spooky going on.

 

Jesus.

 

Surrender.

 

Surrender, surrender, surrender.

 

Or ghosts will get the best of you forever.)