forests were created for the utterly insane with tentacles for arms and the fungus crawling up the branches of abandon clasp on to apples rotten with worms that make a spectacle of themselves like that time you leapt across the sidewalk in your adidas pumps and you swore you could leap over the car like a ninja only your laces were untied because it was the latest fashion and you fell on your face in a pile of dog shit too high to shovel aside and when your friends stood around you and searched for your teeth in the bile and the shit and the dog shit-dee-shit in your mouth, you still managed to smile and insisted you did it on purpose to show them that you were willing to do anything to ensure your friends would remember you in twenty years even if it is to tell their children about the guy with the white shoes who had high dreams and landed hard on a pile of dog shit.

and then he came upon a path of sanded stone, littered with gems, up from which grew flowers and mirrors. in one he saw his face, smooth and red, glowing like a child's, and upon that face there was a smile and when he opened his mouth to say "where did that come from?" out came a vision. ethereal. corporeal. dead but alive, ghostly but tangible. high above in a mist where only dreams rested and demons played ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

i'll tell you a secret but you have to keep it to yourself and you cannot share because this is where the mind forgets and the hands are separated and there can be no blame for the tendrils of thought that escape from me unbeknownst to you or me or that guy over there, but we are all in a sink that has reached its limit and we are swirling down the drain and a day will come when we realize how busy we are from the spinning and in all our laughing, all our protection, all our self-preservation we will have forgotten that we did nothing but hope for the best while we were dying, lost and alone, across from him and across from her and though they have funny noses and though they suffer each day with insecurity, pain, rotten families or the inability to cook a souffle they are in this drain with me and with you and there we go, down like a carrot in a garbage disposal...

i had this dream. we were sitting on a couch and the couch was at a round table in a restaurant and we were surrounded by people and on our laps, over our bodies, was a granny afghan made of bright colors and brown and black too and above the collar of the blanket we were laughing and making jokes and everything was normal and fine and healthy but under the blankets, our hands were clasped tightly, explicitly, making love to each other as if there were no other place to go but the cold air out there and if we wanted to, we could stay, we just would have to stand up, in front of all these people, and show them our hands, but we could not; we were afraid....

and i woke up in a sweat with my shoes in a tangle beneath the sheets and the cat was on my face and i remembered that time when i died and my family and friends mourned and i was dating a man who said he loved me but he moved on and what kind of love could he possibly have felt if he felt he could move on and what kind of love did i really have if when i woke i thought only of myself and how sad i would be if i were to die and never meet the man beneath the blanket who was ready to stand, who held my hand tight like an acorn with a stone inside that breathes and tells you futures?

and who can i tell about that dark spot inside of me that i have held around forever as if it were a stone to be treasured, savored, never advertised, a place so deeply hidden that even in death, dreams can't capture it? but my life branched on and in that dream i held a towel up between me and the man with the gun never realizing that this towel does nothing... when we're drowing down the drain of a giant sink called life.

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