Favorite dream of mine.

I dreamt I was a young, fierce orphan girl, flat chested and wiry. My best friend and my intended was a fellow orphan. He would hold me to him when he laughed, great lungs booming around me. We tormented our ancient city.

Playing one day on the sandy edges of the town, we found a book with a map and an corroded navigation tool made of bronze. We set out to find the treasure it described, although we could not read or use the tool. We just knew that was the proper response.

We went deep into the deserts. The deserts were shaded every hue, and as the sand moved dunes took on new colors. We were awed by the beauty, and although we were about to die of thirst, our eyes praised the world. Holding dirty hands, browned and naked skinny, wonder eyes.

We collapsed. Desert gypsy's found us and a large woman who had lost a daughter took me from him. They left him.

I was convalescent, planning murder, covered in beautiful colored blankets. Wakeful in a tent, with lights shining on the fabric, I saw his shadow creeping along the edge. His knife came up and cut open the tent cloth and he stepped in.

Overjoyed escape into the desert.

Inevitable.

Tonight, sitting square between my mother and my best friend, retelling the story of my aunt who became a sort of intellectual Marilyn Monroe. The blond hair and roots, button down shirts, leather bound books and leather bound chairs, with a pipe between her Chanel lipsticked lips. I realized that I am headed on a short course toward that approximate spot, with the addition of eventual parthenogenesis.

After all this time, what should have been said:

We should have wanted to skip to the last page- and throw down the book. We shouldn't have felt we could trust the future as we did. We were in no hurry because we knew we shouldn't get tired; and when two people feel that about each other they must live together- or part. I don't see what else than can do.

And of course, repetition is everything my heart says. And my heart says throw anything away that you procrastinate on. I am saying yes yes yes and no no no, and calling my sister in the early morning to tell her about my garlic throwing itself out of potting soil like heaven bound souls or the mighty bamboo.

Conversation on completing taxes

I call my father to tell him my amusement at reporting the 44 cents I received from Walmart stock this year, my amusement at owning any Walmart stock whatsoever. Stock still under custody of my father, and I am twenty-five.

I remind him that he gave me a gun for my sixteenth birthday.

He tells me that he has planted a garden. I exclaim, oh, your liberty garden! He tells me that he has hired a landscaper to plant a garden for him, and a plumber to create an automated sprinkler system.

Quothe he: I cannot possibly mess this up.
Quothe he: I just want to muck around in it.

He says that he is trapping raccoons all week, and freeing them far away from his liberty garden. I ask him, do you expect to catch them all?
He says, enough.

He had thirty people over for brunch this morning and he made grits: Not cheese grits, but brie grits.

Training at the Buy Counter

Today, sorting through piles of clothes, Chris turned to me and said, "You should notice that the woman who owns this... owns this. She owns this... and this." We wondered at her very small array, that she saw nothing wrong with such variance.

Pattern Recognition

I secretly love the strange howls the dogs give to passing sirens, the way I love the smell of skunk, eating flesh off mango stones, or shucking corn.

If you hit him when you aim it will just be luck.

I am reading today, in the sun, and the woman says to her friend abruptly, "When my water broke." I left soon, misunderstanding rising like steam. I learned to skip a brick on the edge of Lake Michigan, I remember hearing stained-glass icebergs breaking with the waves. Words are hesitant and sly as all of art and commerce. When I talk to the dogs my voice sounds badly dubbed. I am reminded of Aristotle's Ethics: Loving seems like making. Wonder rises in the morning, lightly walking on top of my feet. We are nestled, going slowly, not falling.

"'Well, anyhow I said there was going to be an earthquake and there was one,' said Margaret.
That was what Emily was waiting for! So it really had been an Earthquake (she had not liked to ask, it seemed so ignorant, but now Margaret had said in so many words that it was one).
With that certainty, her soused excitement began to revive. For there was nothing, no adventure from the hands of God or Man, to equal it. Realize that if she had suddenly found she could fly it would not have seemed more miraculous to her. Heaven had played its last, most terrible card; and small Emily had survived, where even grown men (such as Korah, Dathan, and Abiram) had succumbed.
Life seemed suddenly a little empty: for never again could there happen to her anything so dangerous and sublime.
Meanwhile, Margaret and Jimmie were still arguing:
'Well, there's one thing, there'll be plenty of eggs tomorrow,' said Jimmie. 'There's nothing like an earthquake for making them lay.'

The next morning, Sunday, they went home. Emily was still so saturated in earthquake as to be dumb. She ate earthquake and slept earthquake: her fingers and legs were earthquake. With John it was ponies. The earthquake had been fun: but it was the ponies that mattered. But at present it did not worry Emily that she was alone in her sense of proportion. She was too completely possessed to be able to see anything, or realize that any one else pretended to even a self-delusive fiction of existence."

The Noble Arts

In the lot by my work is a man who paints splatters, and sometimes through the door I can hear his voice and see his tanned hands as he tries to sell pictures to tourists. Lately he has had some success, due to claims that his own paintings were made by a four year old prodigy. And what a relationship to have to one's work.

Quite apart from that, indeed as far as may be, my dear Milwaukee brothers are deep in their art. It is found at http://www.wereanonym.us/
When we lived together I said I would sew them jackets like Wendy from Neverland, and they would wake me up at two in the morning to dance, and my room was covered in flowers, and one of them chopped off all my hair.