Dream Interlude

Face pale, on a quilt of journals: some open, some closed, like checkerboards. Black and white is the face and hair, somewhere in between is the desk’s pigment. Blacked out on a stack of books, with eyes closed—but half open—drooped to the end of the spines. Sore to the point of screaming when standing. I go deeper into dream flashes, I jolt and the wood shakes.

A subconscious strobe light flashed the insides of my eyelids into a black funnel. I thought of all the times I fell asleep in the light, totally exposed, probably drooling on a muddy book that gives me E-Coli when I start to drench my neck in a surplus of mucus. All of the Great Lakes in my skin rolls.

The funnel drifted along, too long for me to remain comfortable. I fell into the flashes of my tiresome—to begin rapid movements of my eyes beneath their lids. Here is what I saw:

Long road and desert ash on the ruts. Axels hovered on beating hot cement. “Welcome to Wyoming” signs line the straight highway into towered plateaus and eventually the Tetons. The signs that have the cowboy clenching his fist to the horse’s reigns, his hat clutched in the other, saluted to the air. Then soon the Montana buffalo, the proud flag of vastness.

And long rain forests on the Olympic peninsula that tuck to a magnificent coastline. Then deeper to tall cannon rocks in Oregon. Rocky coasts and highway tribulations, with sand and shotgun shells. Where fishermen harass us for loitering and using the gas station just to clean Montana mosquitos off the tough plastic bumper.

Now, under tall pines in the schoolyard. While en route, I realized the wind's volume; loud enough to carry thumping chants from abandoned chapels at the top of the highest hill over the Champlain Valley. Far too loud to get any work done. The blades of grass swirl in the Pasteur down below—so, it distracts me. And this canopy on the plateau, closer to the mansions once inhabited by deans, doctors, and philosophers, does muffle the wind, but the bellow feels like a dense cloud of sonic smoke on the tree line.

Thus, the drool in my ear.