Tag Archives: dreams

Verbal Detour

“Scenes from a Dream Landscape” is an experimental poem that was published in my collection Vestiges (Alabaster Leaves Publishing/Kelsay Books, 2012). The original version was much shorter, and while editing the Vestiges manuscript, I challenged myself to go deeper, exploring the idea of a “dream landscape” by continually asking, “What if?”

For some reason, I’ve linked the poem to the U2 song “A Sort of Homecoming” from the album The Unforgettable Fire (one of my all-time favorites). I don’t understand the meaning of the song, but I love the poetic lyrics, especially these lines:

“And you hunger for the time
Time to heal, desire time
And your earth moves beneath
Your own dream landscape . . . ”

Scenes from a Dream Landscape (Alternate title: The Keith Jackson Poem)

A shaft of morning sunlight,
the sounds of the city awakened,
a hallway carpeted with beige sequins,
a keyhole in an apartment door
revealing a woman lying on a bed,
her thigh exposed and covered in blood,
a ticking clock pasted to a nose missing the rest of its face,
a passageway to a cellar overcrowded with dancing wax figures,
an old woman on a sofa
knitting the blond hair of a girl chained to the floor,
a kitchen table made of stone and cluttered with
smashed whiskey bottles and ashtrays engulfed in flames,
a bookcase filled with only one volume—Kafka’s The Trial,
an oil painting of an electric fan
spitting green pigment in all directions.

You go deeper into the unknown,
propelled by an urge to make sense of the images.
You knock twice at the door, then turn the doorknob and enter.
And then you see yourself standing
in front of a funhouse mirror under bright pink lights.
A warbled, digital voice says:
“Welcome to our experiment on human unconsciousness.
We thank you for being a test subject.”
The lights go out, blackness cloaks you, a door swings open,
and now you are being moved
along a conveyer belt inside a stadium tunnel.

The Rose Bowl. Photo Credit: Visit Pasadena.

You come to the place where the cement overhang meets the sky.
You lean over the orange metal railing and now you see
thousands of people dressed in white hospital gowns,
sleeping on cots spread out on the turf of the Rose Bowl.
The sun begins rising and bathes the San Gabriel Mountains.
Keith Jackson’s voice comes over the public address system
and announces, “Please welcome our new guest.
Our breakfast special this morning
is poached ankles and toasted eyelids.
And don’t forget to swallow your medication
immediately after eating.
We hope you’ll join us later this afternoon
when the Ohio State marching band
takes the field and dots the I.”

Next you feel two small knees pressing against your chest
and a set of hands tugging at your ears.
Your eyes open and you find blessed comfort
in the face of your daughter Mary,
who screams, “Get up Daddy. You can’t sleep all day.”
Keith Jackson’s morning announcements then fade out,
replaced by a request for pancakes,
orange juice and a trip to the zoo.

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Here’s to nurturing goals in the year ahead

Last week I was looking through some composition books that I use for jotting down writing exercises, journal entries, story ideas and other scraps of information. In leafing through the pages I found an entry dated August 3, 2012. It’s about an encounter I had over the summer, but I will present it here as a brief essay because I think the story has some relevance as we get ready to catalog another calendar year.

A woman was sitting with her legs crossed on a wooden bench in a wide hallway near the entrance to a lecture hall in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications on the campus of Syracuse University.

Her back was to me as I came down the stairs from my office on the second floor of Newhouse One. I turned in her direction and walked toward the men’s room at the other end of the hallway.

A hallway in Newhouse Three in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

I noticed she was in her early twenties and I surmised she was a graduate student. She had long straight brown hair, was wearing a gray sweater and had a cell phone cupped to her ear.

As I strode past her I overheard her say, “I love it. I really do. But I have all these other goals that need to be nurtured. They really need to be nurtured.”

I wondered who was on the other end of the phone. I also wanted to know what goals she was talking about.

Were they career goals, family goals, personal goals, artistic goals, romantic goals, financial goals? What did this young woman want from her life and what was standing in her way? Lack of time, lack of money, lack of opportunity, lack of patience, lack of support? Or was she on the cusp of seeing her ambitions realized?

But I also thought, can goals really be nurtured? Can we massage them and bend them to our will?

And what’s the difference between goals and dreams? Goals and hopes? I guess a goal implies making a plan, setting forth on a path toward a destination, toward accomplishing something tangible. There’s more effort involved than just making a wish and hoping for the best.

In reading my notes, I wanted to relive the incident; instead of going down the hallway to the bathroom, I would have liked to stop and talk to the woman and try to get some answers to my questions.

And since this is just a notebook exercise, I took the liberty of transcribing a fictitious conversation with her.

“What do you mean by nurturing goals?” I asked the woman.

“What?”

“What are you talking about when you say you have all these goals that need to be nurtured?”

“Were you listening to me?”

“Yes. I couldn’t help it. I was walking to the men’s room.”

“It’s none of your business.”

“OK, I understand. And I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m interested.”

“In what?”

“In you.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m curious to know if people can really nurture goals. And since you mentioned it, I’d like to know what goals you’re talking about.”

“I already told you, that’s none of your business. Now leave me alone, please.”

“All right. But I had to ask. The curiosity was killing me.”

Even in a fictional world the woman revealed nothing to me, so her story must remain a mystery.

I don’t know if she will make good on her plans for success. I don’t know if she will go beyond nurturing her goals to seeing them come to fruition.

But I will make a wish as we usher in 2013. I wish her good luck on her journey of self-discovery and I hope all of her goals will be fulfilled in the new year.

I also wonder if the woman was a plant by God, an angel placed there to make me listen to the ticking clock, to awaken me from the routine of that summer workday and remind me that time is elapsing. And if I want to do anything with my life I can’t wait for tomorrow.

So the incident makes me reflect on my own life goals. I ask myself, am I doing all I can to nurture them? Am I expending the effort necessary to achieve them? I guess I have a way to go in that department.

But I will take my cue from the woman sitting on a bench and talking on a cell phone. In 2013 I will do my best to nurture my personal and professional goals. I hope you will do the same, and I wish you the best of luck as you go at it.

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