Little Weirds(10)

I have my whole stem and this is what I am and what it is. I am the tender stem. Who is the sun who will return every day just to make sure I open up, and who will give me my own dark evening to close and just be within?

I like the sound of bugs talking to each other outside in the night.

I think the air smells best when all of the tree smells get swirled up by a storm. Big old trees on my street listen to me and watch me in a nice way like I am their niece.

The plants and flowers in my window boxes just space out and sigh. I’d estimate that I have spent about forty-five percent of my lifetime spacing out. What do you do?

Okay. End?



Version 3: Me

Morning, House, Now

About Me:

I am supposed to be touched. I can’t wait to find the person who will come into the kitchen just to smell my neck and get behind me and hug me and breathe me in and make me turn around and make me kiss his face and put my hands in his hair even with my soapy dishwater drips. I am a lovely woman. Who will come into my kitchen and be hungry for me?

I make it very obvious what the right way to treat me is. If you don’t think it’s important to hold hands and you are lukewarm about snuggling, don’t bother sniffing around my stall.

It would be great if you are not weird in one way or another about what your mother did or how you feel about your penis but I know that is a lot to ask.

Personality types not preferred: Know-it-alls, meanies, grumps, vultures, spoileds, piggies, and especially bullies.

Preferred: Lovebugs, creatures, boo-boos, rigorous thinkers, wild-hearts, gentle-minds, pets.

This exercise is actually too sad to do.

All I want to do is disappear deeply into my own thing and you can decide whether or not to join but I’m pretty much going to enter my own vortex.

But are you there? Please come close enough so that I can see you, and then I will try to do the rest for both of us, because I have not learned my lesson yet and do not possess the faith to believe in the partner who does his side of the thing. But I would love it if you would, because that would be dreamy and then I would also have that faith.

I will give you every single treat.





Letter: Dreams


Dear Ms. Slate,

It has come to our attention that you recently created a dream in which you were waiting in line for a sandwich, and that this was the whole dream.

As if that is not enough, there is a concerning report that your subconscious also produced a tensionless seven-hour dream about watching an airplane land during the day and that, again, this was all that happened. There was not even a sunset or a sense of where the plane was landing, and apparently the message of the dream was, Nothing cared that nothing cared.

Really, Ms. Slate, this is starting to feel difficult.

To be clear, nobody is asking for you to go back to Dracula disguises himself as a Frog and waits at the end of the bed for you and only you, and obviously you go right up to “Frog-Dracula” because “frogs indoors who don’t run away and frogs who only want to be friends and sit at the edge of the bed are a real stroke of luck,” but then right when you get to the Frog he turns back into Dracula and you are fooled into being killed by him, and he is laughing at you because he tricked you, and just before you die, you realize that you hate the idea of being tricked more than you actually hate the idea of dying, and you also realize that you are afraid of “getting yourself sucked out of yourself” by a man who is dressed in a tuxedo, which is usually an outfit for a classy man at a fancy party, but really Dracula is just vain and thirsty and there is no party and he is nothing but a bitchy, life-drinking, life-draining liar.

There is no conversation internally to suggest that we go that route again.

Nor are we inclined to revisit You are an archeologist and you are wearing all khaki including a khaki explorer-hat thing and bad long shorts with crotch puff, and you are at a flea market/book fair that has been set up in a school gym in England in 1970, and you stumble upon an artifact from the “way before past,” and this artifact is a pencil sketch of a staring woman, and then you look closely and realize that it is you, like, it’s your soul, and the message is vague but far from positive about your lifetime(s), and there is a sourness or curse regarding romantic stuff and the curse is attached to your interlife spirit, and the picture sends something that feels like “the energy of bile but not actual barf” from the picture up to your terror-frozen face and gaping mouth, and you wake up so rigid with fear that your body feels like a bunch of found objects that are the following: parts of a broken rocking chair, old spoons, and chains from the swings on swing sets.

I think we can all agree that if that’s our only other option, then we should just shut this whole thing down.

And to be totally frank, we can’t even find the language to approach You go into the first-class section of an airplane and a man who represents an amalgamation of all your exes is somewhere on the plane, and you do not have a ticket for first class, and you find that the seats in first class are not seats but normal-sized brown plastic beds with white sheets, and you do not have a ticket but you still get in one of the beds and pull the covers up and hold the top of the covers between your teeth and you feel the linen in your mouth, drying up the parts of the mouth that it touches so that it would be too painful to speak, and then you casually and completely go to the bathroom in the bed, you poop in the bed with a neutral attitude while lying flat on your back with a dry, linen-stuffed mouth. We can’t, as they say, dignify that dream with a response.