Nightmares and Memory

Ah goddamn it,

the nightmares

are starting to talk again,

I hear their cackles

slowly rising

into the damp air

and I wonder how

I will respond to them

once they start to scream.

I go back in time for now,

to forget the present despairs

and remember the wild and strange

events of my past.

Did I ever tell you

about that time

on a Friday morning in June,

I brought a bottle of pretty pink wine

into the shower with me,

sitting in the tub

swapping sassy rants with the showerhead

and the bottle

thought it rude

to interrupt us,

so he said nothing.

And after finishing the bottle

that could’ve been a prism

reflecting light,

he fucked off to the trash instead,

and I slumped

onto my bed and passed out

since I hadn’t slept for two days

dreaming of times almost forgotten:

brother and I

staying up til 5 in the morning,

swaying in rocking chairs on our back porch

with the twinkle lights

stapled to the walls,

drinking whiskey,

smoking cigars,

talking existentialism and

the fall of capitalism,

Sherlock Holmes and Dostoyevsky 

(and yes, that’s really how our conversations would go);

a night in which a fuck buddy now a stranger

convinced me to drive to Atlanta

after getting off work at 11,

got fucked up on the way,

headed to a club

of shiny people

moving in their sloppy ways,

grinding and rolling my eyes,

Jesus this is so boring,

and I wanted to shove my way out of there

and dance revolution in the rain

on the streets outside

the conditioning concrete walls

just to prove I belonged to no one;

a time I flew to Colorado

and read a paper on Lacan and Kubrick

out loud at a conference

and felt smart for the first time

since my dad had died

who always told me I was talented and

wise beyond my years,

and finally feeling a connection

with the people around me

like I had found my free minded family;

once you and I

saw a poster in the hallway at school

for a protest in D.C.

the next day

walking against 

that horrorshow war,

and we jumped in my car

after making some road trip CDs (of course),

drove through the night

to stomp with the revolt spirits,

being spit on and yelled at

by the sideliners

appalled at our

demands for less body bags,

capital hill

a war zone in itself

of armored guards

with the biggest guns Id ever seen

and their teeth dogs

hauling people off to jail

in big white vans;

Singing Beethoven at Carnegie Hall

in high school

and believing for a moment

that there might in fact be a god

which seemed to me to be found through

a remembering of the sacredness of art;

Getting lost on the streets of London,

spending nights in a youth hostel

with a couple from Australia,

climbing the pyramids in Mexico City,

capsizing in a sailboat in Boston Harbor,

seeing ghosts walk in and out of rooms

at my moms house,

watching drunk frat boys

try to walk home after parties

my freshman year of college

in a tiny town in Ohio,

driving to New Orleans

and standing in a vampire shop

with my brother and my girlfriend

as a celebration

after his last round of radiation

which held off the brain cancer

for a few months after that,

the only two times I didn’t sing

in church when my dad died

and then my brother several years later,

screaming at my abuser

in a dark parking lot in Tennessee

fierce enough that he backed off

for the night,

chatting with strangers about Ginsberg

in coffee shops in Minnesota

as the snow came  down,

refusing cocaine from a boy

in a gas mask

and some 4^th of July party,

writing my first poem

sitting next to a stream

in my backyard of forest in Michigan,

dragonflies glistening in the sun.

Deep breath,

remember and forget

and remember again,

art is its own life force,

death comes to us all,

feelings come and go

no matter the intensity,

I have survived and learned

so much thus far

as I look back

and no matter what our

nightmares tell us,

we can and will rise above them.