I Imagine Your Eyes...

I imagine your eyes will save me….your mysterious eyes that speak of passion and romance even in their shyest, most shielded moments…it’s a fool’s errand (it always is) but I am foolish enough to indulge the fantasy just the same. 

Your eyes…your tender eyes…will save me.  Will save me from my shadows…will save me from the fire…will save me from myself.  And I will be whole again.  And I will be happy again.  And I will light a fire in your eyes and spend the rest of my days working tirelessly to keep it there.  I imagine your eyes…they will save me.

I imagine your touch…your gentle arms, your tender kiss, your sweet bosom, your delicate but strong hands…I imagine your touch will save me.  It is, again, a fool’s errand (nobody can save us if we can’t save ourselves) but, again, I am foolish enough to reach for the dream just the same. 

Your touch….your tender touch…will save me.  Will save me from my books and my poetry…will save me from the cold, lonely nights….will save me from myself and my missteps.  And I will be whole again.  And I will be whole for the first time.  And I will be happy again.  And I will be really happy for the first time.  And I will take you into my arms and shelter you from the world while you shelter me from the world.  I imagine your touch…your touch will save me.

I imagine your heart…your mighty heart that I know without really knowing it all…I imagine that your heart will save me.  It is, of course, a fool’s errand (a bittersweet and eternal journey) but I am foolish enough to wonder what the world would look like with your heart in my corner.  

Your heart…your mighty, guarded, shimmering heart…will save me.  Will save me from the sad songs and happy feints…will save from the heartache of memory true and memory false…will save me from starry eyed self and let my make believe heart float gently down to real earth.  And I will be whole.  And I will be happy.  And I will save a place for your heart in mine and spend the whole of eternity trying to make myself worthy of that trust.

I imagine…I imagine your eyes will save me…

Brothers (We Can Sleep When We're Dead)

So me and Bruce are wandering through the mall under the pedestrian bridge and towards the big doors that lead into the air conditioned sprawl of goods and services.  

It’s a beautiful day…bright, blue, sunny, the breeze making music with the trees and the dancing flags on their sturdy flagpoles…but the mall parking lot is sparsely populated.

Bruce was mostly in blue…denim jacket, well worn Levi’s…I was most in black.

I’m itchin’ to get back on the road…to make music and make people smile.  Bruce was always itching to get on the road…to make music with me and the boys.

We just got off the road, Bruce…we’re tired, ready for some sleep.  I knew he wasn’t gonna hear it but I had to say it anyway.

Bruce laughed the way he does as we lingered in the gun section of the mall’s biggest store.  We hefted gleaming black pistols while the kid behind the counter…the white badge on his red vest identified him as “Jimmy”…chewed gun and looked on with genuine indifference.  We can sleep when we’re dead…we’re young and dumb and we should be out makin’ girls and makin’ rock ‘n roll!

We’re not that young anymore, Bruce.  I knew he wasn’t gonna hear that but I said it anyway.

We left Jimmy and his guns and ambled over to a rack of acoustic guitars.  Bruce picked up one…beautiful golden wood…and strummed.  Bruce smiled and sang a couple of bars of “Brothers Under the Bridge”.

You don’t need no band, Bruce.  Just you and your songs and that guitar…just like the old days.

Bruce nodded.  That time he heard me.  He tossed me the guitar and picked up another one.  You and me then…just like the old days…we’ll stay up late…we’ll crisscross the country…we’ll play hard…we’ll sleep when we’re dead.  Will you ride with me, brother?

I sighed and strummed the guitar. I smiled and shook my head.  Yeah, Bruce, of course I’ll ride with you.  I can sleep when I’m dead.

I Dreamed That Los Angeles was Burning...

I dreamed that Los Angeles was burning, orange fire and black nuclear days having erased it from the cynical heart of California. 

One hundred miles down the road I was sheltering with the one person I loved and the childhood shades of three people I wouldn’t want to spend a brief, bleak eternity with.  The sky was dark as a winter’s midnight and set a-sparkle with bright yellow atomic rain falling sure and steady.

I didn’t care what happened…the why wasn’t relevant…and I didn’t feel panic…when the world was over there’s no point in losing your head, after all. 

That REM song was playing everywhere, gallows irony set to a jaunty beat, and I kept trying to sing along even as I drifted through the house wondering when the pale horse was going to arrive. 

I thought about confessing my sins.  I thought about laughing at the sheer stupidity of the world and the way it was ending.  I thought about carrying one of the people I didn’t want to spend our brief, bleak eternity with off to bed and having angry, bittersweet sex until the yellow rain put us all out of our misery.  I thought about not ever really being who I always imagined myself to be.

I dreamed that Los Angeles was burning…

Red

Dreams can really mess with your head sometimes. 

I’m standing on a street in the community where I live (just outside the gates of a preschool I’ve walked past, in real life, more times than I could possibly count)…it’s bright, warm and blue, day and I’m talking and laughing with a friend (in the dream I couldn’t really see her face distinctly but we share an easy intimacy that lets me know we are, at very least, good friends…maybe more.)

Another guy comes up (in the sudden way people sometimes appear in dreams) and starts to talk to me.  The woman I was talking with says sometime about him interrupting our conversation.  The newcomer, someone I don’t recognize from my waking life but who I apparently knew in this dreamscape, tells her to shut up…tells her that men are talking.

I tell him to be cool and to apologize to her.

She calls him a rude asshole.

He hauls off and punches her in the face with all of his might and she sprawled to the sidewalk crying.

And I saw red.

I’ve always been a strong, imposing (some might say scary…large black men being constant objects of apprehension for some) guy and as a result I haven’t been drawn into many physical fights in my life…and I didn’t have a problem with that.  I never wanted to lose control.  I never wanted to really hurt anybody no matter how much I thought they might deserve it (my brother…the Universe bless and keep his troubled soul…was the only person who could, when he was of a mind, goad me into blind rage…and I never hit him even on those rare occasions.)

But, in this dream, I saw red.

And I hit the man.  The first punch seemed to startle him…he wasn’t expecting that I would hit him…but I grabbed his shirt with my left hand and held him up before he could fall and I punched him over and over with my right.  He put up no resistance but I didn’t stop until his face was a bloody pulp.  I let go and he slumped to the ground and curled up in a fetal position.

I was still seeing red.  I bent over him.  I screamed…”you don’t hit women!”…I grabbed his limp, cowering body and pulled him out of his fetal position…”you especially don’t hit THIS WOMAN!”

I seemed about to hit him again when my friend, her face bruised and streaked with tears, put her hand on my shoulder and told me to stop.

I didn’t seem to recognize her at first.  But the red went away.  I let the man drop from my grasp and I stood up.  The woman touched my face and told me it was okay. 

My hands were shaking…the woman wiped my face (apparently I was crying) and hugged me.  I didn’t hug her back…my hands were shaking…my hands were bloody…I looked off into the distance while she tried to calm me with words I couldn’t hear.

And then, quite suddenly, I was awake.  I apparently wrenched myself out of the dream world and back into the darkness…it was just before 5 AM…of my bedroom.  My hands were shaking and I had a pounding headache.  “What the hell was that?” I said out loud to the emptiness of my room.

I got up.  I emptied my bladder, put on some tea, fed the cats, took some aspirin.  And then I sat here and wrote the dream down.  I wrote it down while it was still vivid.  I wrote it down because there’s no one here to tell the story to.

Red.  I saw red.  I saw myself out of control and, to be honest, relishing the violence I was indulging in. 

Maybe it was a manifestation of seething, unrecognized anger in me…anger at others, anger over losses and perceived betrayals…maybe it was anger at myself expressing itself in violence I have always stayed away from…maybe it was a way of tapping into the rage inside…or maybe it was tapping into the need to  be somebody’s “hero”… 

Or maybe a dream is just a dream…

Maybe. 

But man dreams can really mess with your head sometimes…

The Ghosts of Michael

The ghosts of Michael visited me in Dreamtime. They are always with me, of course, but sometimes they appear more vividly than at other times…last night was one of those more vivid times.

I was in my mother’s house…the house where I went from boyhood to manhood (with all of the amazing, confusing, bawdy, wondrous, bittersweet glory that still-unfolding journey entailed)…and the ghosts, the sweet specters of memory, were dancing…dancing for me, dancing with me, dancing all around me.

All of the ghosts…the tender ghosts of Michael…were visiting, lingering, haunting. They always haunt I supposed…lingering soft in the ever expanding realms of memory, fancy, and the heart.

The ghosts danced…caressed…laughed…kissed…slapped…mocked and comforted and cursed me…so many ghosts. They spoke of the past…they sang of the future. As always, they were my memory…my fantasy…my conscience…my mirror…my heart, my soul... my universe writ in broad flourishes and in fleeting, poignant snippets.

The ghosts of Michael…blue, gold, and green in the shimmering dreamscape…stayed with me until the dawn called me back to the waking world…they stay with me even into the waking world…they stay with me, keeping safe the past, opening doorways into the future….the ghosts…the always lingering, always welcome ghosts.

I dreamed about my friend Lori last night...

I dreamed about my friend Lori last night. I still think of us as friends even though it’s far too many years since I last heard from her.

Dreams are strange things…we all know that…and I’m always intrigued when people I haven’t actively thought about in a while show up in my dreams and make such a powerful impression that they linger with me into the waking hours.

I wonder how the world is treating her…she was a girl of radiant, fragile beauty and quiet, wounding melancholy and for a brief season I wanted nothing more than to give her safe harbor from the unforgiving seas of disappointment and pain that buffeted her far too often.

I hope that she’s safe.

I hope that she’s happy.

I hope that she’s in the company of somebody who sincerely loves and appreciates her.

And I hope that she thinks about me every once in a while and that the memory makes her smile the shy, secret smile she used to share with me when she let her guard down and relaxed into my safe harbor.

(Me and Lori in the administrative offices of Max Factor & Co. in Hollywood, CA circa 1979)

The Ghost of Maude

The ghost of Maude doesn’t visit me often. But I’m always blessed when she does and last night, in the middle of a particularly active and vaguely unsettling dreamtime, she visited me once more.

My grandmother…Maude (everyone called her Mom)…was 96 years old when she died. I didn’t know her as well as I wanted to but the times we did have together…sitting at the little table by the window in her always delightfully fragrant kitchen as she cleaned green beans and told me wonderful, beguiling, bittersweet stories of her rich life…will linger with me until I pass on back into the light.

“What’s botherin’ you, Buddy?”…my father is no fan of his given name and early on adopted the nickname “Bud”, my grandmother took to calling me, his first born son, “Buddy” almost as a matter of course…she was the only one I allowed to call me that into adulthood.

Mom rarely smiled but her eyes were always bright with savvy and patience and unspoken, but unmistakable mischief…she had proud, angular reddish brown features…she looked like she was as much Native American as she was Black…and she wasn’t smiling as she appeared out of a shadow in my dream.

“Don’t know, Mom,” I lied…I was so pleased to see her that I wasn’t going to waste her time with my navel-gazing even in dreamtime.

“No need to lie to me, child,” she said, drifting close and touching my face, “you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I replied hanging my head.

Mom put her thin, delicate, red-brown hand on my cheek and lifted my face up to look at hers…with her smiling eyes and unsmiling mouth…and winked. “Gon’ be okay.”

I smiled. The shadows swirled around us. And the ghost of Maude was gone. And I fell…into deeper, unremembered… or dreamless…sleep.

Me and Bob and Jesse and Rosemary

So it was me and Bob (Dylan) sitting in the backseat of a big old jet black Lincoln while a pale blonde guy named Jesse was sitting in the front passenger seat smoking a big cigar and shouting into a cell phone and a buxom Mexican-Irish woman named Rosemary was behind the wheel pushing 65 down a winding road circling a steep mountain.

Rosemary negotiated each curve with a calm aplomb that belied that fact that each screeching turn could be our last while Jesse smoked and shouted and Bob was lying back with his eyes closed humming the tune to a song he was writing in his head.

Me, I occasionally broke the fourth wall of the experience and realized that it was all a very vivid dream and, in those fleeting moments of lucidity, I wondered what exactly Darryl had put in those brownies.

Rosemary, who laughed every time we took an especially sharp turn but who was otherwise quiet, kept a steady hand on the wheel; she was dressed all in black…black t-shirt, black jeans, black leather cap…something I prayed wasn’t some kind of omen.

Bob looked over at me and mumbled something; I couldn’t make out a single word he said. He fixed me with a laser-hot stare as he waited for me to reply. I shrugged and said “Yeah?” Bob smiled and punched me in the arm and then he closed his eyes and started to hum again.

Jesse cursed and threw the phone out of the window as we took an especially sharp curve with apparently only two wheels on the road and Rosemary laughed. Bob hummed and Jesse smoked and Rosemary gunned the big old jet black Lincoln down the seemingly endless mountain road laughing around every perilous curve and me, I was surprisingly calm throughout it all.

And then I woke up.

“Okay,” I said as I reluctantly acclimated myself to the morning light sneaking in through the window shades, “that was interesting.”

I made a mental to note to ask Darryl about those brownies the next time I saw him.

Friday the 13th (Waiting)

Friday the 13^th. Were I a superstitious person I would be worried. But I’m not. I have two black cats and my birthday falls on the 13^th day of March so I’m certainly not sweating things like superstition (knock and wood :-)

It’s summertime in America and the sea breezes are coming off the Pacific are trying to soothe my soul and I’m waiting. I am surrounded and kept safe in warm, golden circles of love and friendship and kinship with the universe but I’m still waiting.

It’s a time of reckoning in the world at large and I’m waiting. All about our bright blue globe, people are living, people are dying, people are being born into a world that shifts and roils and morphs…for the better and for the worse…with every passing instant and I’m still waiting.

Voices are being raised in song, blood is being spilled on the sands and on the streets of far too many nations, dreams are being given wing, and hope is thriving where it should have no foothold…and I’m waiting.

Friday the 13^th…just another day in tapestry of never-ending time…and I have no time for superstition. Because I’m waiting…I’m hoping and praying and swearing, working and dreaming and fighting…and waiting. I’m waiting on the world to change.

- thanks and apologies to JM -

Dirty Laundry

I dreamt that I woke up (yeah, I know…just go with it) and heard a raucous commotion in the outer room. Walking out of the bedroom I found my dirty clothes hamper had been dumped out onto the living room floor and Jerry Springer, Montel Williams, Judge Judy, and Maury Povich were furiously digging through my dirty laundry looking for…well actually, I didn’t know what they were looking for.

“A bit on the nose, isn’t it, folks?” I said as sardonically as I could so soon after waking up.

All four of them sprang up and surrounded me. “Laugh it up, buster,” Judge Judy snarled poking my chest with her bony finger, “but when I find the goods on you I’m going to drag your no-good butt into court and let you have it! Just you wait!”

“Ooo-kay,” I said trying to take a step back from the spray of righteously indignant spittle coming from her thin, angry lips.

Maury Povich spun me around and brought his face so close to mine that I could almost taste the turkey sandwich he had for lunch. “There’s a 99.730017792% chance that you’re the father and I’m gonna find the proof!”

Before I could reply to that, Montel Williams spun me around. “My psychic will tell me everything I want to know about you, buddy. Prepare to be smacked down on national television!”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that nobody watched his show any more.

Jerry Springer nudged me and bent close. “Look, if you’re cheating with your alcoholic midget nympho half-cousin who’s pregnant with your priest’s love child, I can make you a star.”

I nodded warily. “Thanks, Jerry, I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Do you know what you want?” Judge Judy demanded.

“I want you all to go away…?”

“No!” Montel bellowed. “You want to be on television!”

“Why?”

“BECAUSE EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE ON TELEVISION!” they all shouted as one.

“And if you’re not gonna fess us, then we’re going to keep going through you dirty laundry until we find something,” Maury said portentously.

I backed slowly out of the room as the four of them leapt back into the pile of sweaty t-shirts and used BVDs. “Yeah, good luck with that,” I said softly not wanting to upset them again. “Lock the door when you go.”

Jerry, Montel, Judy, and Maury ignored me as they clawed at different pieces of my soiled clothing.

“Eww, what’s that?” I heard Judy ask as I ambled back into my bedroom.

“I’m not sure,” I heard Jerry reply with no small amount of concern in his voice, “but I hope to God that it’s chocolate…”

* * * * *

MKW Blogstuff: Neverending Rainbow

3:39

The pounding on the door was insistent, anxious; it would not be denied. Solid metallic thumps on the security door thundering through the ebony stillness of the wee hours…adrenaline surging through every fiber of my being. I lurched up, all of my senses screaming to be left in their restive state, wrenching myself from the dream world and back into the real world.

I glanced at the clock on the nightstand, the bright crimson glow of its numbers mocking me mercilessly…3:39. Rats. It was just a dream.

My disorientation faded slowly as I sat up in bed. I listened for a moment…just in case it wasn’t a dream. The world was, of course, almost completely still…no pounding…and every housemate (two-legged and four-legged alike) still slumbering peacefully in their chosen sleeping places.

I shambled to the bathroom…darting apparitions, having followed me from the dreaming, played hide-and-seek behind me but I ignored them.

Yawning, I shambled back to the bedroom and tumbled back into bed…and then I lay there wide awake and praying to be accepted back into the dream world while every other housemate (two-legged and four-legged alike) continued to slumber peacefully in their chosen sleeping places.

The clock, taunting me with its impertinent crimson numbers (stupid clock), continued to mock me mercilessly: 3:48…4:09...4:17… 4:28...4:44…5:03…5:11...5:27. Until another distant thump echoed through the gathering lightness of the coming dawn. The newspaper was on the front lawn and I was awake on top of my bed.

Rats.

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More MKW Blogstuff: Neverending Rainbow

Mike Willis' 115th Dream

It was a beautiful, very blue and very sunny, day and we…an eclectic group of people of varying ages…were being marched (three by three) down a winding country road. The landscape was quite lovely indeed, we all had very comfortable walking shoes on, and the men and women with the guns were seemingly very relaxed and relatively easygoing (maybe the fact that they had guns and we didn’t had something to with that…)

We were led into sprawling pens filled with weathered wooden picnic tables topped with large wicker baskets filled with fruit and cold bottles of water (each of which containing a thin slice of lemon.)

I took an especially juicy green pear after the companions who had marched by my side…a bright-eyed Japanese woman with long, straight black hair cascading down to the small of her back and a strapping, stoic young man of indeterminate ethnicity…had chosen a shiny Granny Smith apple and a bunch of ruby red grapes respectively.

Across the table from us, not eating any fruit but puffing on a fat, expertly rolled joint, was Leonardo DiCaprio bloviating about world peace (which seemed strange since we were prisoners of some kind…albeit with delicious fruit, cool sparkling water, comfortable walking shoes, and, for some it seemed, access to marijuana.)

Leo wouldn’t stop gassing on…and he wouldn’t pass the joint.

We decided he was a pompous, selfish bastard but we listened patiently just the same and smiled to ourselves because we knew that when DiCaprio did get the munchies all of the fruit would be gone. Apparently we took our victories where we could get them.

I woke up before I found out where we going to sleep (hopefully Leo would have shut up by the time the sun went down…)

(Thanks and apologies, Bob :-)

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More MKW blog stuff: Neverending Rainbow

Press Your Luck

Last night I dreamt I was driving a bus over hills and dales while behind me they were taping an episode of Press Your Luck (the cheesy, kinda addictive game show from the 80's)...not sure how they got all of those people in the bus but it was a dream so I just went with it.

Ahead of me in another bus the ever-avuncular Gene Rayburn was hosting an episode of The Match Game (couldn't tell if Charles Nelson Reilly was there but odds are he was...)

At one point we crested a hill and Gene's bus took a hard right and disappeared around a curve...I kept going forward. And the road suddenly fell away and we were in free fall going down what seemed like a hundred miles towards a rather forbidding plain.

"Damn," I said, "this isn't good."

Behind me a cute, chubby redhead was bouncing up and down and screaming "No whammies! No whammies!" as I tried to figure how exactly to tell the Press Your Luck audience that we were all about to die.

And then I woke up.

What does it all mean? Hell if I know. I've found it's better not to overthink these things (they're just dreams after all, right? Right... )

Namaste, y'all.

Sleep Writing

Last night I slept fitfully for some reason. Not sure why...it was humid but it's been humid, off and on, for a little while now. At some point...round about 3 AM (and yes I remember thinking about the Matchbox 20 song "3 AM", I very often associate music with things going on in my life...including and especially the seemingly insignificant moments)...new pages for my novel in progress flooded into my head.

Or at least I thought they did.

At this point, the separation between the dreaming world and the waking world was quite blurry and so the scene of me tumbling out of bed, powering up the computer, and, after my eyes had adjusted to the intense glare of the computer screen (did you know these things shine like the sun in the 3 AM darkness? Yeah, me neither...), adding 3 new pages to the manuscript could have been either a vivid dream or an unawake reality.

Stumbling out of bed (again?) at 7:30 after continuing the fitful slumbering for a few more hours, I had my first cup of tea and made my way here...to the computer. Microsoft Word was open as was Soul Deep. But there weren't 3 new pages...there were 5 new pages.

Wow. Sleep writing. Unbridled creative impulse or troubling sign of an unchecked id? You decide...me, I'm just going to go with the flow (hey the pages flow nicely into the ongoing narrative and that's all good with me :-)

* * *

After reading over the pages, I checked the e-mail and found a copy of press release announcing that I was one of three inaugural winners of a biannual writing contest. New pages written into my novel while half sleep and now $400 worth of swag for another story...this writing stuff is pretty cool sometimes :-)