The consequence of dreaming,
Between the blood-shot weekdays,
Is too dark to admit I’m afraid:

That there is a better lost in the status quo
Like a dryer sheet in a load of laundry;

That there is a possible lurking just out of reach
Like a jar of peanut butter stuck up on the highest shelf;

Or even—yes even—that a happiness can be caught
Like a chase after the bus that came two minutes early.

Oh, friend. I hate to disappoint you as you wade through coffee and the news in your bedroom slippers by the fire—

But the consequence of dreaming is dire.
And so we had best stick to the humdrum—
Never changing our habits or the channel again.

We all go grocery shopping on Saturday at 4pm, and that’s America for you, but do you have to buy the last demi-loaf of artisan rice flour sourdough and swoop in to get the only carton of organic, local, grass-fed, 2% milk that I like, then have the tenacity to take the final gold foil-wrapped bar of imported Belgian dark chocolate and, for that matter, give me a Christ-save-your-soul stare when I spend a good five minutes debating the respective virtues of KY and Astroglide?

Thank god, at least, America sells liquor with its bread and milk and ****.

i have to laugh at my prissy plastic christmas tree, forcibly strung
with strobing pink lights, saddled with frosty gingerbread men
and a bowtie of outgoing evergreen garland. i mean, what
would jesus do with such gaud, nuzzled in rank hay beds
with an audience of fetid sheep and crooked shepherds?

skirting the rusty rose of a brooch
dangling on canvas bodice as she leans
tightly over me; the waves of wrinkles
on her be-bangled red hands pointing to the
wrong punctuation; this is dream-building
in the fifth grade; don't end the dream
too soon, she gruffs sing-song like
a prize-winning racoon; and still applauds
the bricklaying we so clumsily feign
for our castles in the sky; tho she, too,
dies of cancer in the last year; the tubes at the
very last weaving through the canvas;
something of a final stitch to the making
of a dream; and so i think all dreams in me
they die in darkness and still i wonder
what happens to the crenellated castle
walls i abandoned scores of years and
many As ago; and still we pat our doeeyes
on their infinitile heads and **** our
cynical shacks-by-the-forest-fires back
into our heads, begging beneath the
damp light of early-onset reverie: save
us, won't you, from the stiff stillborn of
dreams our generation lost to the fantasy
of getting what the saddest, dreamless
dollared dupes decree; oh be better yet for me,
my naive sums, and take your brick-laying;
your canvas sheen; your impossible, doubtless
dreams with broach and gnarl; with gruff and
soundless trill; your soulful self metastasized  
with every beat
to the happy grave.

My name is Arthur Ness and I'm a writer.
You may not of heard of me.
I'm not a good one.

Writer,
That is. You see, I've been trapped in this
Hotel room, room 56, for 18 days, and

i lost the key twice, burned myself
with the coffee maker
three times and

in the sauna downstairs—
well, you get the idea.
I'm not a good

writer.

i cannot try every flavor
of ice cream on every summer afternoon
when the restless sun stripes the
empty vinyl booths of the
dated 1960s parlor in
gauzy, burnt yellow.

but you ask anyway.
you always ask, wearing
that faded blue baseball cap
that has no place in your burnt-yellow 50s
and a sari velcroed too high up your torso.
you look like a colorful burrito, i laugh
so you don't hear.

"stop pretending," i want to say
between the vanilla and the
strawberry, because that's
all i ever have.

i never do, though. instead, you remind me
i get the vanilla on my Eddie Bauer sleeve every
time the sun spies
and the gauzy strips of afternoon
slide across my face.

"i like vanilla," i say, apropos of
nothing. you nod, i think, or else
you take another cream-starved lick of
your cone, stacked like a lego plaything
with vanilla, strawberry, and
vanilla again.

sometimes, but not every time, after ice cream
we walk the long oak-lined boulevard
that leads to the house. many of those
totems have stood for 100 years.

"good for you," i nod,
staring up at their petrified limbs and cagey leaves.
and with a vanilla moustage hugging my upper lip,
i thank the oaken giants for living 100 years
and never leaving.

i am grateful you
didn't know the fissures
that seized our ancient kingdom

our two atop the marriage mount.

there were many reasons
for the fault, of course, many players
whispering at court, chipping the stone, but i have  

an imperceptible bias for these things

and flatteries of lesser pawns
that played on vanity and power and prowess—
the virulence kings—were nails and nail and nails

that cracked the stone on which we sat.

who knows what fossils can be made of shards of us?