8.1.23

The stories you have heard about me are true. The accounts are not exaggerated. Poetry cannot be taught, but it can be felt. Only a few people are doing it well. There isn't that much to know. It takes a while for the paragraph to get warmed up. Before the sentence is ready to receive me. Sometimes it is never ready. Sometimes I am waiting at the door for nothing. There isn't anybody home. I can't even begin to write my letter to you. We've stopped talking and you never gave me your address. Every once in a while someone will tell me you're still alive. My letters take shape for nothing, a small hand extending in your direction. It's true I am still writing because you told me to. 

So every time I think I know something, I wake up the next day. The school of sleep teaches me everything I need to know. In my dreams I catching a fish. In my dreams I am a fish. In my dreams I am catching the fish and it is flying above my head into the hands a friend. In my dreams I am the line, the fish, the friend. There is a great hammer coming down. I am remembering you now. I am remembering your childhood, which you survived just recently. In my dreams you are making a movie. In the movie I am telling you about my dreams and you turn them into images with sound. In this one, we are escaping something. In this one I am a plane falling from the sky. Then I am the sky. I feel something strange tumbling in my chest, it must be the plane. In this one we are in a strange city that feels familiar. We sit down on a park bench and you take a bite of your sandwich and then offer it to me. I open my mouth. I wake up hungry.