Underwater Ballet

I had some other place to be.   There were complications―
the rooms were too large, the stairway too steep, the walls
were caving in around me.
I had a rope-ladder in order to exit via the window
which was only about 3 stories up but slanted out at a 45 degree
angle over the rocks & the sea below.
Halfway down the ladder I realized how ridiculous all this was.
I stood in a darkened parking structure smoking a cigarette.
A woman approached me to say that she didn’t need any matches.
As she walked away I noticed that she had a tail like an alligator
dragging on the floor behind her.   In Mexico I
looked down from a stupendous height as a group of children
gutted & skinned some kind of water buffalo.
In the room next door it was a rainy morning in Seattle.
A naked woman drank coffee from a very ornate antique cup
made of a mysterious metal that changed shape as she sipped from it.   It was distracting but I still wanted to fuck her.
I was accused of a crime I knew that I didn’t commit
but the evidence was so overwhelming I began to
question whether I had actually done what they said
& inexplicably forgotten all about it.

“Moss Landing, no I mean Mussel Shoals”
I kept confusing the two.
I had a job shaping boards at a surf shop in Ventura.
My skin was coated in a thin layer of fiberglass dust.
I had just won the Nobel Prize for literature.

I’ve never had a dream in which I could fly.
I know that many people share that dream of
flying bird-like high above the earth.
The closest I get is a kind of levitation
where I rise up only a foot or so above the ground
in an upright position
& with an extraordinary amount of effort
manage to glide forward for a few yards before
dropping back down onto my feet.
It’s a very difficult & exhausting exercise
& although I must have dreamed it hundreds of times it
never gets any easier.

I’ve had dreams in which others fly.

Sometimes they sprout wings & take to the sky,
other times, wingless, they just seem to
swim through the air.