another manifestation

my dreams are often vivid and bizarre representations of travel, vehicles and transportation, houses and buildings, with animals and sometimes spirits that have just whisked around the corner out of sight. this poem, like others, is written after dreams i've had that move between the semblance of stability, and the marginal haze of sleepwalking. 

 

startled awake

deep in the night,

sliding downward to the end

of a fresh-mopped floor, you peer,

head sideways to the gape of an elevator shaft,

opened, like a guillotine.

you don’t remember falling

asleep but land your dreaming thirst

outside to the fountain in the park because the water

is cold,

even though it tastes like wet dog,

and the air that you expel

from your lungs coats your mouth like

the stale closet air beneath your back staircase.

you might wake up,

with a limp in your walk

from a clump you stepped in near the fountain, packed into

the grooves of your boot and no time to scrape …

here’s the bus! with a picture on the side with happy people

and text that says “we love the bus!”

you step up to the changebox,

the bus driver’s hat says

kerouac and you say hello.

he’s driving to denver, yammering into the mirror

to some gonzo donned with sunglasses and a

blue feather boa draped over his violin case,

discussing universal health care

because it’s in the papers.

they’re barely dressed with their opinions, going west,

smoking cigars like castro twins.

you take your seat.

gonzo man takes a drag

on his havana and punctuates

with a truman capote flick

of his finger, “something smells …”

a guy with a dog reading

steinbeck juts forward

like a ventriloquist’s dummy

with a wooden jaw to say, “why yes, it does, doesn’t it?

"what a beautiful day.”

it’s a day where things come alive, even if

in the wrong way, even if  in a dream where

a cigar is more than a cigar

and where the love for a bus with

a cadre of dead fools is

just another manifestation of the perfect day ahead.