Another dream

In the wee hours this morning, I dreamt I was almost out the door of a hotel with a male friend going to a swank party down the street. Along came my friend Dorothy who turned into Julia Roberts. We stopped at a jewelry counter where she quietly told me she had taken 120 nitroglycerin tablets and they were going to take effect. What? I was sure she would die. Then, as she was talking to the clerk at the counter, Julia fell back to the richly carpeted floor, and started doing gymnastics, but with extremely contracted muscles. Her clothes had changed from an elegant dress to something like a one-piece swimsuit. She continued doing these horribly tight movements so that her body looked like a giant Charlie horse. She assured me she was just fine, though I wanted to call 911, and the clerk did in fact call 911. I left her there to go find a bathroom. Well, what would you do? (come on, it was a dream. In real life I would save Julia Roberts, of course!)

Cadillac Confessional

Forgive me for being twelve,
blond, a good kid, a bad
reporter. The frontseat
refuses to keep

its quiet, the reststops refuse
any longer to withhold
their brutality secrets from
our faces. I’ve fallen for
the fifty year

old American Shriner who
gives rides.
I’ve invoked the goddess
I’ve desecrated – no – I
flamencoed cemeteries
that led to fiery tap-dancing.
With sisters
Tiny nymphs.

A breast
touching arm, the tongue
hooked inside teeth.
I’ll get over it and
bring myself about all over
again: the predatory American
the groping banker

with the hands. But I’ll not
cry tears dripping
someone else’s salt. At
twelve, I was wizened
by a Shriner

of fifty in the oversized
celadon Cadillac past Rolla.
My mother
shamed me into accepting
the fiver. I could die.

That Shriner is now 104
with a corpse in his grave
in the shape of my slipper.
My foot is a beautiful appendage.
I sometimes run. I don’t
indulge in abandonment.

I don’t hide treasures from
the old-age sisters who sang
songs beyond my heart
the last time we danced.
But I did. Found the guts of
the story and let those
intestines sing their
tales again

and again. I harmonize.
I’m a good reporter
who can’t help accepting
life, grasping toward
the future. This is not
the finale.

All of my finales
are prologues.