This hybrid poem/narrative was written 4/5/2020 and performed live online on 4/9/2020.
Cold Spring Pandemic Dream with Bird
I’m wading offshore, water to my waist, watching an island slowly submerge. Almost out of sight you wave to me, and I wave back. Then we forget what waving is for.
…
I enter a fully formed dream where I’m in some kind of institution and am told to watch a movie
in a fake friendly way, as institutions do
A smile that implies a bite
A swallow that follows a chew
It’s about a young man who was wrongfully imprisoned. I leave the building and enter his world. His sister is desperately trying to get him freed to no avail. It is clearly, deeply unjust. One against a mechanistic world. People forming the parts. The feeling sinks in - the outrageousness of it. A Fox CNN MSNBC outrageousness, but unmanufactured.
The unjustness transmogrifies and I become the one about to go to prison unjustly. Why? Insert scene of skating down a hill in a race but with rules like driving - big four wheel skates, bell bottoms, tight ass, tube socks, speed, fuck you - there’s a replay like in sports or court where my infraction is evidence for my impending imprisonment. I am sentenced for an improper skating move. For flair. For speed and fuck you.
Life is over and there’s no out. I’m like a hapless pet trapped in a house, dreaming of creeks and trails and smells and squirrels. I thought I knew what freedom felt like. Did I? We don’t think about time, it’s just a condition of our existence. To us, it appears to have a direction and we arrange ourselves accordingly. Freedom is like that. Social fabric is like that. Once it’s gone we feel what was there all along, what we were walking talking scheming planning making money on.
Prison is impending. No appeals from my new sister will change it. We are birds smashing into fashionable store windows, blinkless mannequins smiling, staring just past us. The looming mass of it is unbearable. “I didn’t do anything” - spoken like someone in blue striped tube socks would.
A full day passes, seemingly in real time. Most of it is lost to a regrettable clarity. The coffee Is kicking in and out the window my neighbor is taking a giant ass palette of Costco toilet paper out the bed of his enormous F250, through transparently transparent glass doors on his neocolonial George God Damn Washington house. (I know, the tp thing is three weeks old but it’s still happening.) The first thing you learn to control is your own asshole. There it is. Whatever else is happening you have that proud white stack.
And there’s a small black bird peering in the window. … It’s gone.
It’s the end of the day and I’m headed to prison, carried by a pushing, pressing momentum. The sense of doom is a slow motion avalanche. Covering, smothering. …. Wake up, I tell myself…. Wake the fuck up.
WAKE UP!
I see the wall the bookshelf the room. In less than a second I was back in our pandemic. Yes ours. Back. The location changed. The weather. Why is it this cold in April? In spring? Never mind. It feels the same. The tone carries furtively from the dream. The same note, two octaves apart. A trap the size of the world, set by the world. And we just walked right into it, speaking and tweeting, thinking our politics and religion and haircuts will protect us. Hallucinations. Ephemeral and powerless.
So I got up, walked around a bit
Or at least I think I did
Went and got water from the garage
Maybe
Our house is lit up with bright night lights everywhere because of my insomnia and frequent walking around in the middle of the night.
Made a few laps of the living room, quiet like I learned as a teenager (imagining I was Native American, as white people do) instead of leaves it was the aching wooden floor, slightly slippery from dust made of shedded skin from weeks spent indoors. If I ran and slid I would skate, like in the dream, but in bare feet. (I just realized “but in” rhymes with Putin, but I’m sure he knows that)
I went back to sleep
Maybe
And I was walking around campus
Trying to get somewhere
somewhere in a hurry. To a class? To pick up my son? Before I had to go to fucking prison again? Now you can see why I questioned whether I actually woke up and walked around. I reentered the same dream in a different location.
I had some electronics with me. Like a phone but more fragile, in pieces.
The pieces fell in a reflecting pool. Time slowed as I retrieved the parts, wet with shiny slimy water. I kept fumbling for things, gathering parts, dropping them. Forever. I needed those objects. Needed them. There was a deadline. Fucking hurry up.
Two engineers said something interesting to themselves about my watery electronics. They mumbled numbers. Their watches were both wrong.
I keep going, losing time, slowing, and the waking world infects the dream world. At once every person around me is toxic. Every being a danger. People who were home, the comfort zone, now minacious, seemingly innocuous, but infectious.
Proximity amplifies tension, touch defiles, breathing pollutes.
They are unwitting demons
like the one I saw in my backyard as a kid one hot sunny day.
… and prison as a metaphor for our quarantine - how weak is that? I know. My unconscious is crude and trying to embarrass me in front of you. Its images primal and trivial. Sleeping mind and waking mind always reconfiguring each other, inhale exhale, mixing mashing. But here the body is the prison - not the house, carried around with you, jangly and iron heavy. No one gets in or near here. You are not a there where I can travel, and I’m not a here where you may arrive.
Dreams aren’t always symbols
Often they are just chemicals - (or a result of them)
And like all dreams they are made up of other dreams. And the daylight brings only the long dream of waking life, also made up of other dreams; little islands of sense that we never look beyond until they start to sink, and we turn our eyes offshore.
We are all offshore now.
Waving and forgetting what waving is for.
A dim, cold light fits itself through the slits in the shades. Dry skin meets drier skin dusting the floor. Words fill my slogged head. These words. Soggy, necessary.
I sit here, writing this, looking for the bird, wondering if my donut is dangerous.
Wait, I hear the bird.
…
Dean Terry
4/5/2020
Performed by Hilly Holsonback and read by Dean Terry live 4/9/2020. Special Thanks to Patrick Murphy.
Available as a pdf here
Still from livestream performance of Cold Spring Pandemic Dream with Bird 4/9/2020