We decided the clock was a woman

I dreamt of the death of my Grandmother. I dreamt of a numbered fortune I would freeze and hammer into shard if I ever got my hands on it. She had called the night before and left a message in a sweet and pleading voice. Surely this and the guilt of not immediately returning the call was what signaled the dream. Much of my clothes are wet with coffee. On some the coffee has dried leaving its fragrant stain, but others remain in a heap on the floor, mush-together with the brown stuff. I delight in imagining, as a hallucinogenic effect of the coffee smell, that they might spring up as if infected with the form of ghosts, and dance rudely about the room for my amusement, or start speaking in riddles to me from their crusted folds.

The reason for the spill is this: I am not sure. I know I came home in a state clutching several bags containing what I must have interpreted as sustenance. In the morning I observed a half bag of chips which had spilled some onto my desk (I ate the strays for comfort of my acid stomach) and a crumpled empty slab of white butcher paper I am guessing at some point contained a sandwich. On close inspection, the sandwich consisted in part of hardened and cold but formerly melted yellow cheese. There was a bit stuck to the paper as a bit of brains might stick to the thick bleached California freeway, turned and broken by some mid-morning seismic shift.

Now I am wearing the sweater which smells of coffee. If there was a detergent being sold in these days with the smell of coffee and if it were reasonably non-allergenic I would buy it. If I needed to. As it is I need it not. I have few things I wear and most of them were on my floor at the time the coffee cup which had been left inside of a paper bag slit itself open for fear of abandonment, was stepped on and crushed open by the drunk and greedy plodding of my own ridiculous and already sleeping feet (for the cup was crumpled or mangled or physically disturbed in some savage way when I found it the next day in a pool of its own thin brown blood.) or…or…perhaps both of these things happened, like the dog trudging to its death in the speeding street whose marrow is already webbed with cancer.

A sweet smell, not unlike chaos, or fear when it withers away with the cold. Shriveling madness, inching away along the back like an itch, unnecessary. Circumstances were tolerable, the itching of madness unnecessary. But nonetheless she drinks with the light out, and when one wanders upon her nonetheless she stays speaking to a stranger she finds ridiculous, staring at a mirrored woman she finds insane. Insane. Insame. I speak. Yes, I speak. Of myself. But sometimes, when the thought becomes alive with possibility, when the thought becomes, as it were, real, I becomes she and she becomes a stranger, capable of flight and centered in fiction and capable of explainable things. For most of the things I keep encountering are unexplainable, the triangular globe hanging from the corner joints like a wad of snot, photographing my face as I stare into it and dream of a knife that might remove it seamlessly and without detection. Would I then attempt something illegal? Would I then hide within the walls or behind them or at the very least out of view to ambush a sick woman waiting for a ride? No giant guttural eye to record my progress to her face. Nothing but a busted alien bug and an empty corridor and stairs for stumbling surprise. But nothing even more so. No progress. No busting evacuated ambush. Reason? No knife.

You I can explain. You are a mystery in terms of facts, but if I were to be asked to place things upon a plate which you would eat you would clean it to prove me right. It is in need that one loves. With personalized plates and seasons and for Gods sake rooms, one wants-more this, more sunshine, less derivative angular shit you call inspired for the walls, less action and more leisure, the leisure of time to talk not for the sake of noise but for the sake of introductions, for the sake of discovery and ultimately love. I have leisure. I have no time to talk. My Grandmother calls me. Her name deserves capital letters, but I cannot call her back. Instead I fear her death like a guilty conspirer. I fear her health like a sentence. I fear my own thoughts when I sleep because it is then that I cannot shape them, that they warp and curl into dreams I can only watch and stutter and shake through until they end or bleed into another. Elbows frozen or liquid, face a hideous mess of emotions, like a retarded but earnest adult. Earnest? Oh the muscles of a swimmer.

I have recently engaged the muscles of sex on a regular basis. From this I have learned the regularity of perhaps the other way of thinking-that dreams are the one and only time my thoughts are controlled, limited to only what is already inside, even perhaps impervious to some insistent whispering in my ear when I have been lucky or cursed enough to get it. In a dream I cannot suddenly be subject to new and destructive information. In other words, in dreams I cannot get fucked. Mute to any possibility I cannot myself conceive and often when I sleep these days I am drunk, so those possibilities are by poison limited. I know this from trying to enter interesting and challenging conversation while intoxicated or full of lust or food. I flounder and drown in their-anyone’s-all of their-voices. I cannot get the rhythm of reply right and when I attempt it, some faster reacting individual across from me has already taken that beat and made far better use of it that I could. I intended to say the cloud looked like a piano. You had it play sixteen discordant and escalating notes. I could never have played them for you. Better you reached it first.

This dream? My intentions? The smell of this room which is pleasant but masking something sinister I am sure...the question I am getting to is this: Is this sinister thing myself, or some presence I am trying, through immersion in vice and doubting of self or immersion in self and the doubting if vice indeed does exist, destroy? Can dreams inspire guilt if guilt exists in the same place as dreams? Surely one does not exist more than the other. But then, no one ever says "Oh, it's just my vivid guilt..." the way one says the same about a turbulent and colorful dream. I dream, and I'm not sure if I entirely believe it, but I've believed in nothing for some time, so nothing continues to surprise me.

As a child I dreamt of killing. Not myself cast as killer, but dreams of killing that terrified me and caused me to wake in sweat. Sweat I rarely knew as a child, being small and stick-like, stuck together at the joints by very little, and almost more like floating bones in their bored and jangling rest, kicking off the front of the couch, kicking my sister under the table. Days and years and minutes spent indoors watching the hours pass into night in which I dreamt of monsters, of fatal situations, of myself falling into something and of animals, vicious leaping muscle aching with spit to end me with a snap and a tear and a rabid sequence of instinctual movements. Now, more and more I dream of logical death-the death that takes slowly and slowly wakes each day with a little less surprise. The kind you hear about over the phone from miles away. The study of an abstract concept which leads to oblivion of the senses. That nothing is nothing is nothing thing. You keep speaking and speaking and say so little. The eventual death in that way. The cloud has been overdescribed. The fence overpainted so it peels and cannot stick to itself, flays in the wind like an exploded stick of dynamite. So here I am overpainted, with nothing to say. Sending up prayers? Keeping it in your head? Either is maddening.

Consider seeing a man screaming at the sky. Consider seeing a man screaming at himself.

A woman gives birth to an hourglass, blood in swirls upon the curved surface. She pants and requests her child. The doctor wrings his hands over how to classify the sex of it or not at all, maybe better to lie and profess the infants death, whether to jump from something or to wipe his hands and make a speech? An associate of his, weaving a joke of his own nerves, assigns it the female sex obviously referring to the shape a grown woman takes at one or some point in her life if she is lucky. The doctor, being a man of logic and humor being a form of magic, does not find this funny. A serious colleage enters the room. As it does between these two, debate ensues.

A man is not a clock.

A clock is not a man.

We argue on the same side.

No, just because another does not take the part that a man is a clock or a clock is a man or a clock is a man and a man is a clock both, doesn't mean...

The associate speaks.

We decided the clock was a woman.

They all fall down.