MOVIE DREAM #1

Mulholland Drive

Dreams, hallucinations, in a town where dreams are bought and sold on a whim. How can someone who aches for love, knows it, lives it then loses it…go on living? How will they dream? Is love only a dream that is buried under sheets or stuffed in the back of the closet or tucked between the pages of a book. This desire growing within us before we can even see, before we even know what to look for. But imagine touching it, tasting it with all that you are, all that you ever imagined but more, then being told that it means nothing. Laughed at, shoved down, disgraced. Maybe it was only a dream. Maybe that’s all it could ever be.

A dream I had last night. The movie still a fingerprint on my mind.

I see myself sitting at a table. People I know are there. People who raised me. People who I was raised with. The table is round and I can see everyone who sits at the table with me. They are all younger than I am. They seem so young. A saint is feeding me with eyes that always smile…no cackle. Maybe she’s a witch. She serves me pita bread filled with a dark soft substance. “It’s snake,” she says and hands me a small container, “sprinkle this cheese over it. It’s okay.” I trust her but I don’t know why. Her progeny sit around me with mouths that chew and grin. I try to eat the pita but the bottom falls out spilling the food back onto my plate. This time when I look up I see someone new. She wasn’t there before, a young girl with wholesome eyes. The ache I feel when I look into her eyes, I know that I will fall in love when I see them in real life. But then they pierce me. They say, “You don’t know how to see. Look again.” Then I understand. It isn’t love that I will see. It will be hope.

Quite often this dream is lost on ideas like success, ambition and victorious triumph. In reality it is riding along with us in everything we do. It gazes at the world with wonder. It sprinkles sparkle in our desire, and simmers lurking after the wind when the cold has overtaken us. It is beyond our thoughts and it never is completely lost, even in despair. It is much more than a hallucination and we do not exist in it alone.

There is a place that wants to pull this dream from your grasp. A place that conceals love in the nightstand drawer in the name of a gun. This place devours hope to satiate its hunger. It salivates at the sound of failure and laps at the tears spilled upon its skin. It burns to earn and conquer and take. It doesn’t understand that the fresh face across the table with wide eyes is the very reason this place exists. It’s hope! Hope that we can all be seen with wonder. Hope that we can love the way that our hearts have always promised. Hope that there is more to life than what it seems. Hope beyond all this naked hatred.

All of this may be true. Somewhere…but not here. Not this place. This is L.A. for chrissakes!

(A) --you must rent this DVD

Aural Pirate

When I sit on the sand and listen to the waves
Am I pirating from them?
Do they crash to their deaths,
The screams of agony drowned by the din?

When I hear the birds outside my bedroom window in the morning
Do I steal away their spirit?
Do they vanish hollow like their bones,
Flying south without their souls?

The conversation at the table next to mine,
Is it illegal when I eavesdrop?
Will they handcuff me to my chair,
Lock me up and throw away the key?

When my ancestors depart wisdom into my ear,
Am I allowed to hear?
Can I impart that same wisdom to my descendants
Or must I check the copyright first?

How can you copyright sound
Or the inflection and tone found in someone’s voice?
When I open my mouth to speak
Should I worry about breaking the law?

Why, that sounds like a fascist state to me.
Pretty soon my thoughts may become illegal,
Pretty soon we’ll be chasing a dream of what once was
When we used to be free.

Of all the beauty that exists in the world,
I would say that music is the most free.
It travels through the air
And never dissipates.

She tells me about her dream. She says:

“I dreamt about you last night. I dreamt we were broken up and I was seeing someone new, someone handsomer and richer like a movie star. But when I saw you again I could feel my heart ache. I told you that we should forget about why we separated, none of it matters, that we should get back together."

I like her dream. I have thought about the horror of losing her to someone better than me and it caused me pain, the kind of pain that she felt in her dream. I still think it's wonderful because of the deeper truth. No matter what happens in our lives we will always have that ache for one another. The seed was planted in our chest nine years ago when we looked in each other’s eyes. My entire life was bent on finding that ache, searching for the reflection of it within another. On that night we found it and held it and cherished it so that it may become the essence of our dreams.

Our boorish neighbors often leave their dirty towels on the fence that separates our property from the one they are renting. Many times, with help from a gust of wind, they fall into our yard.

“What happened to the towel?” Christina asks me.

“I put it back on the fence.”

“I throw them away.” She tells me with a malicious grin on her face. Her eyes dance and burn with an evil flame. For some reason that scares me this morning. I’m not scared of her, just scared of the parasite that’s claimed her. Christina is not an evil person, but evil has a way of shifting from action to action. Would that gleam fill her eye if our neighbors were more considerate instead of the selfish people they present to the world?

I realize that wars exist because of this very same principle. One side adopts that which they ultimately oppose on the other side. They act out of fear or hate or anger. The actions do not exist within the person initially. The evil within the actions of others jumps from their lives into our own, and then we act in a similar fashion not realizing what we have become. We justify it in many different ways. Their wrong makes our wrongs right. In order to save ourselves from evil we must crush it, destroy it, wipe it off the face of the earth! Unfortunately it can never be destroyed if we act with malice. Crushing and destroying others, no matter how bad they are, is just as horrible because they have lasting negative effects on others. It’s like a virus that cannot be removed from the tainted heart. We’ve become a very sick race of beings.

The reason I was scared when I saw that look in Christina’s eye was because there have been times when I did the exact same thing for the exact same reason. I’ve thrown their towels away when I found them amongst the weeds on our side of the fence and I know that I did it with the same disgust boiling the blood in my body, with a blaze burning in my eye. It scared me because I did it all with a song of righteousness in my heart and had no idea that it was simply the laugh of the devil in disguise.