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Some Memories of a Dream

She drugged me and then she locked me in her apartment. And then she called my wife.

*

No, first we had sex. Or I dreamed that we did.

But this happened in a dream, so if we had sex it would have been dream-sex. Or perhaps not. Perhaps only the dream of sex is the dream-sex. The camera in the camera in the camera (in the camera). All my thoughts are like that lately, more and more obfuscated and repeated. As if they had been put into an alembic, and left soaking. What happens in an alembic? Is that right? Is drying what is left over? Is the process even large enough for a dream? Alembic. All these objects, symbols that I don’t even know the purpose for. Like most words. Like absolutes especially, like ‘god’ and ‘sex’ and ‘death’–and ‘dream’ itself, and many others. Like, what color were the pills?

*

In a dream sometimes you eat candy and it tastes like that. Like bark, I mean. No, not bark. Not bitter. It tastes pink, but pink that is coarse and woody. Like bark, like cotton-candy full of spider webs and praise and a graininess that dissolves quickly. While you forget the outcome…

I can almost hear her describing it in that way, holding a finger up to her mouth, shushing me… Darling, you’re a fool to believe in this…

Except of course she didn’t say that in the dream she didn’t say anything. People in dreams don’t open their mouths often. They are very meticulous, very careful. What they tell you is often beyond your hearing, and beyond your remembering.

*

She was very private about it, though, very sweet. Very cordial. That’s the word. The phone might have even been one of those old fashioned rotaries that used to hang on the wall by the refrigerator. The kind that, you know. Had a cord. A corded yellow phone, symbolic of butter and eggs and relationships.

Or come to think of it, the phone more likely would have been mint green. Mint being the color on the other side of the color wheel, the color most opposite from pink.

*

Dream symmetry. Dream for the dream-symmetry. Like a piece of the puzzle you complete me and so on and so on. Only the opposite colors and objects don’t join except via transitional pieces. Without much pushing and shoving. Without hunting. Without the whole dream.

Throughout which you keep on flipping the pieces over and trying them into the beautiful open positions. And finding them more beautiful. And turning… and still turning…

Is this a transitional piece?

*

I slept on her sofa and she drugged me. Later we had sex. It was good. And although we were both probably drugged out, she was very penetrating in her insights.

Let’s go on the roof, I said. This could be a grocery store, and you could own it. I do own it, she said. It’s a candy store.

But really, all the while, we were down at the beach.

*

I grew hostile. The colors are shoved up under a wet mat decomposing on a green stoop. A bus goes by. The bus is yellow, not pink. Nothing is pink, except for the storm, except for the broad green grass, the leaves caught in the storm drain. Through which blood trickles.

How much longer can we take this?

*

I keep a key. I mean, she drugged me while calling my wife. I wasn’t ready for that revelation. I should have locked the door tight. I should have crammed my yellow mitten under the door. I should have been able, with my mint-green mind and my yellow mitten (my peel my banana my way of being a cool one), to keep that part of the dream quiet while I sorted it out.

But the room was pink. Everything was turning that way.

*

Besides. If you scream in a dream, it means that you’re dying.

*

We had sex and then she made me tea. The tea was green. The tea was green with white leaves in it. The plates were pink. The cups and the plates were.

I said, this can’t be sustenance. No, no it’s not that, she said. It’s just tea.

It was just tea. I drank some. I felt better.

*

We had sex. I said that her breasts were pillows. I said, magic beans. I said that, although I knew it to be untrue. All metaphor is untrue, an approximation at best. A gesture is sometimes sincere sometimes not. Sometimes you get caught with the windows open.

Sometimes.

I could die in rapture on those breasts.

Amnesia