La Muneca

Last night I dreamt that I was at a party at Barnes and Noble. I talked with the supervisor there about how I used to be a supervisor. The technology of how they made those clear stickers they put on the shelves to divide the subsections had changed. I was there with Morgan, but all these boys I went to church with when I was a teenager (Seth Allen, Jacob Thomas, Micah and Logan Fagree) were there and they were trying to get me to come hang out with them. Morgan had pissed off this black woman who ran the store and she was associating me with him. I told her she was beautiful. People kept offering me a cake called "muneca" (there should be a tilde over the "n"), which means "doll" in Spanish. The cake was colorful, and each piece had another piece on top of it that was smaller and self-contained like a little debbie cake. A woman pulled off the top of a white piece of cake and handed me a chocolate piece.

I woke up and I wanted to listen Vic Chestnutt's song "Sad Peter Pan" from the album Is The Actor Happy? Here are the lyrics:

it's the plan of most
to discover that magnificent ghost
when did I get perverted
and my innocent eyes diverted
from the view so grand
imbued with distractions

I'm greedy like Senior Babbitt
I'm just chasing that electic rabbit
I'm a reluctant rebel
I just want to be Aaron Neville
with a crown on my head
and my denim shirt all dark with sweat

I'm just pushing the paint around
on advice from your lying mouth
you touched me and then you ran
and left some sad Peter Pan
all alone and awkward
but a transformation, I swear it will occur

A few months ago, I hung this poem by Mary Oliver above my bed:

Dreams

All night
the dark buds of dreams
open
richly.

In the center
of every petal
is a letter,
and you imagine

if you could only remember
and string them all together
they would spell the answer.
It is a long night,

and not an easy one--
you have so many branches,
and there are diversions--
birds that come and go,

the black fox that lies down
to sleep beneath you,
the moon staring
with her bone-white eye.

Finally you have spent
all the energy you can
and you drag from the ground
the muddy skirt of your roots

and leap awake
with two or three syllables
like water in your mouth
and a sense

of loss--a memory
not yet of a word,
certainly not yet the answer--
only how it feels

when deep in the tree
all the locks click open,
and the fire surges through the wood,
and the blossoms blossom.

1986