Adding a Page to The Pop-Up Book of Nightmares

 My nightmares aren’t really even nightmares until I wake.
Then, in that dawny fog of yawning, I realize I am not
who I’ve been all night. I was a man driving a new pick-up 

all afternoon in a familiar desert gilded by two moons
I’ve never seen. I was a woman climbing a muddy, rooted
cliff to a broad, grassy yard backed with a yellow barn 

and a green picnic table set for lunch with corn on the cob,
ham sandwiches, three crows, a jar of honey, candles burning
in brass candlesticks, and a bleached human skull painted 

with a jaunty smile. I was a lonely child skirting wavelets
on a freezing beach of glossy, black pebbles in a dim day
so cold an ancient sea left endless edges of ice, fractured 

and immediate, on a littoral curve beneath ragged, pink
granite ranges and a low, red sun. I was something ugly
and insectile scrabbling on more legs than I can count

among stalagmites and the steady, plinking, grainy rain
of stalactites in utter blackness brilliant with other senses.
I was some gray lichen no one can name, locked to rock 

and eating minerals in high places of thin, scouring winds
raw and fierce under a sun moving so swiftly through the sky
that the light was a golden oscillating ring among brief stars. 

Rising, I wonder if this life is mine more than any other one
I dream. In none of those dawns do I rub my eyes, hovering
between two lives, sure I will never be sure which is mine. 

How I Lost My Library Card

This kid at the library was reading aloud to himself in the corner,
and some old man reading the sports page--wasting time on men
who play with balls for money!--told the kid to shut up, a library,
he said, was supposed to be quiet, so be quiet, for God’s sake,
and of course, in his mind, there was no doubt about who God was. 

When I saw the poor kid’s surprise, his embarrassment, his shame,
I finally spoke. I said, “Man, you shut up. Look, you grumpy fool,
what we have here is a kid reading. He’s reading! These days,
that’s a goddamn miracle. Thirteen hungry, homeless people live
on the library lawn, and you’re upset because he's reading aloud? 

Listen, you dumb bastard, silent reading is for the dead! Are you
hearing me? His lips are moving because those words are alive.
He’s speaking aloud because what those words need to revive them
is his breath. He’s using his voice because all that story needs
to be heard is his voice. So I have an idea. Toss the newspaper 

in the trash, and go play some damn basketball, instead of sitting
on your flabby ass gazing at numbers about games you never saw.
And while you’re at it, find this poor kid a chair, get him a platform,
a podium, a pulpit, put him on a pedestal to shout from his book
in the strongest voice he can raise, and ask him, no, beg him, to read 

to you, to me, to the library staff, to the patrons, to the thirteen
ravaged souls on the street, and to the rest of this vast, distracted
nation. Let him read his book to us all and make us all one people
for once concerned about what really matters. Let his voice lead us
through a story we need to hear! Let him read! Just let him read!”

Redemption

 Someone convinced me that to praise Jesus, I should visit someone
languishing in jail, so I slunk my way downtown to Oh-Triple-See.
For all anybody knows, those letters could mean Oklahoma City
Community College or even Orange County Conservation Corps,
but they don’t. They mean O‘ahu Community Correctional Center. 

The barbed wire and concrete walls are on a boulevard in Honolulu,
catty-corner from a recycling and redemption place: a nickel, a can.
I guess redemption keeps the streets fairly clean. That’s a good thing.
So there I was. The clanging and slamming of steel was as musical 

as it was peaceful. At random, a cheerful guard picked me a prisoner,
one with no visitors since intake. Frisked and X-rayed to invisibility,
I stared through lipstick-smudged, bullet-proof glass at one mean guy.
What could I say? I picked up the phone. So did he, a weird mirror
of reflections, shifting, and bent elbows. Warned to avoid the personal, 

my tongue was tied to details of his incarceration, and they weren’t
pretty. Grand larceny, drugs, domestic abuse: this guy was no friend
to Jesus, and not to me either. He asked what the hell I was doing here.
I wanted to know, too, so I asked him what he thought. He thought 

I was an asshole or a fag. All his sentences included the word “fuck”
three or four times as a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, or interjection,
and I’m not used to that sort of language. Few words actually function
fully as five parts of speech. He just didn’t care. To kill some time,
I asked him what he wanted, and he asked me what the hell I thought 

he wanted. I was justifiably piqued by then, so I guessed he wanted
a li-hing-mui-sprinkled cherry slush from Byron’s because I was sure
that’s what I wanted. He was surprised, but then ardently advised me
to encounter myself sexually. By then, I’d had enough bad humor, 

so I hung up and stood up. He banged his erect middle finger loudly
on the glass, and I wondered if the print on that very tip was the one
to clinch his conviction. How ironic. He ordered me to stay, I left,
and he cursed me because I could. Jesus or not, I had done my time.
In my trunk, I’d crammed three reeking garbage bags of empty cans.