I had a dream today about a piano. There were people there, and they stood over me as I tried to play, but the keys were all seamed and crumbling through my fumbling fingers.

You'll figure it out, they said, in this perfectly round place where piano keys are divided by metal barriers and the music doesn't carry and the strangers just stand and stare at you as you curse your muse. I was finally pushed aside, for the love of god make room for someone else to try.  

We lined up against the wall, then, a reasonless jump in that swirling universe of dream logic. It was wooden, the wall, I remember because the color reminded me of the deep hooded metal stove in the old cedar house where I learned that a scraped knee isn't as much an ouch as a trophy. We stood there along the wall for a time that was neither day nor night, and no one spoke.

And then I awoke.

Got pills, I’ll swallow them
Take the chills that follow them
I don’t want to wallow
I’ve got a heart that needs hollowing

The gobs I’ve been gobbling
Don’t help with the wobbling
The legs are still hobbling
But the heart’s no longer
throbbing,
This bottling,
needs a full on throttling.

So the maudlin
Is phoned in
But the tones are all
honed in this turkey with the bone in.

The drumming keeps droning.

This strumming keeps zoning.

And this mouth keeps on foaming.

It's not so much the giving. That's living, the burst from your heart that connects to the hive mind; the leaving all the doubt behind.

It's the after. Exhausted and shattered and sweating out all your exposed emotions, and nothing. No word, no glance, as you stuff all your **** back into the red suitcase that contains your world and no one else's.  

There's no expectation for commendation, but you wish someone would attempt some relation as you mop up the ****** mess that once was beautiful, but is now splendorless.

Music is useless for making a statement. The whole world is trying to make you complacent and you'd smash your guitar, but your money's all spent so you cry in your bed wishing you were a poet (or a surgeon or a botanist or at least brilliant) instead.

This night has fallen so must I into the sleep so dear only the the singing birds slinging their melodies hear the last dying crickets in the gray glow of the first hint of the sunrisen day.

Catlike and furtive, creeping toward the last of this or that odd prey, these words unwind till the thread runs out.

All heart within but stark without.

The monsters don't hide in the closet, or under the bed, or in your head all full of juice. They roost. It's not their fault, following through with some innate longing they're called to.

It's a simple, impish existence, these monsters, who might prefer to be doctors or lawyers or sound designers for Alice Cooper or Rob Zombie or Blondie; alas they burrow and nest inside my ***** laundry.

A wise person might have said, "Take care, kiddo, and guard your head against the evil that so easily nestles there." I reflect on this through the cloudy density of my beer an wonder, could he have been right? Might I fallen intrigued, ensnared, by the casual taunt of an apple's dare?  

We climb the beanstalk for the giant only; the goose is second hand. The giant's defeat is the glory. It doesn't matter what the stakes contain, live or die, princess or mother or cow or land, as long as a marching band greets us at the end of the ride.

The monsters don't hide in the closet, or under the bed or in you head full of juice. They roost, and they can't help us themselves in a world full of books gathering dust on shelves overlooked where their hardcovers guard against  stray shells unloosed.

It's
strange
to
me
to
write
one
word
at
a
time
on
each
line.

Who
speaks
like
that?

Poetry,
I
think,
should
be
a
conversation
between
you
and
your
soul.

Your
soul
may
not
understand
unnecessary
intermittent
pauses.

Well.

I
don't
understand
unnecessary
intermittent
pauses.

Case
in
point:

Writing
this
was
difficult.

(It's
probably
a
literary
weakness.)

I
imagine
that
a
soul
would
speak
in
at
least
partial
sentences
without
such
halting
spasmodic
twitches.

Unless it doesn't. I am not your soul. If you find wholeness and depth and truth by writing this way, then carry on.

*******.

(There's the rhyme. There's always a place and a time for convention.)

Irrevegant scapegoat with uncooked beliefs sheaths his knife when he finds the doubts he worked so hard to bury.

The words don't carry that weight anymore, he mused, and laughing aloud at the faces of the brandy-plied crowd he turns on his heel and vanishes into the rain.

We watch this, silent as only a stunned mass can be when faced with eternity, then turn to each other to mutter low-murmered threats about the night and the sight we'd just beheld.

A special time for all, as we sink back into hell.