One

Photo by Dave Avram

Recently I had to take a round of industrial-strength antibiotics that really messed up my sleep cycle. As a result, the dreams I had were weirder and scarier than one might typically anticipate. The first three nights' dreams were filled with interactions with people I knew in my life who had died and then decided that they had been dead long enough and expected me to revive/resurrect them so they could continue living again. These were people for whom I did not hold endearing memories, people who in life had pressured me to do things I wasn't capable of or inclined to do. So having them return to tell me that I had to do something totally impossible was both frightening and stressful, and I spent many hours awake after those dreams trying to quell my anxiety. 

On the fourth night I dreamed I was a child ziplining somewhere in the forests of New Hampshire with three of my grade school companions. But this was ziplining with a twist: We were jousting with garden tools as we zipped past each other on separate adjacent cables strung through the trees. This was cutthroat activity at its pre-adolescent best. Clearly we were unsupervised. Our goal was to see if we could dislodge a friend's pulley and send him tumbling through the trees to the ground, likely to grave injury, probably to death. I've never ziplined so I don't understand the mechanics of the pulley system, but I did understand the mechanics of the garden fork I held in my hands and the hoe, spade and brush hook my friends held in theirs. I understood how deadly any of these implements could be if they struck the person rather than the pulley inches from their head. We all did. And yet.... On one of the passes -- there were many failed passes -- I missed striking the pulley and instead jabbed my friend in the neck with the prongs of the garden fork. Fork intact, he slumped in his harness and zipped on to the end of the line. I woke up shaking and did not go back to sleep until nearly dawn. 

By the fifth night I was ready to stay up all night if I had to, but sleep arrived at about midnight. In this dream I was a college-age student and I was studying creative writing. The professor, a prickly old guy who seemed to like his books more than he liked people, assigned us a task at the start of class to write a complex love poem that we would turn in at the start of class the next day. I had no sense of how complex love poems might sound. I only knew song lyrics and greeting card messages, and those were far from complex. So I agonized for hours over what kind of love poem I might write. Who should I write it to? What kind of love was I expected to profess? Was love something I even understood in my early twenties? What was love? What was its opposite? Could I write about that instead? Did I want to share my feelings in front of my classmates? Could I just write "Just give me an F on this assignment" and turn that in? Nonetheless, in the 23rd hour a poem came to me that seemed to track some sense of loving or not loving, and so I wrote that. Here it is:

No love poem this morning
No love poem today
Because this is the day my grandmother, demented,
Decided to fish a turd from the toilet and wrap it in tissue 

   and put it in the top dresser drawer in her bedroom
To keep it for posterity for her heirs
For my brother and me.

No love poem today
Because this is the day my mother decided she couldn't handle her mom

  and my brother at the same time

So she sent my brother to visit me.
My brother who is 17 with pencils in his pocket and a phone in his pants
Drove across town to hang out with me to see what I do as a student at university
My brother who has followed me around since 7 a.m. asking me stupid questions
Like "Is this all you do, just one class in the morning and that's it? 
That's so cool, that's so fucking awesome.
I wish I were in college. I really really do."
This twit who forever will be that seven-year-old brat who put glue in my cereal one morning before school
And almost killed me
But I still love him because he's my brother.

No love poem this morning
I just can't find it in me to express affection for people and things messed up so jacked up so crazy fucked up
To express affection on command
Like I'm some kind of grateful trained little animal taught to perform for treats or snacks or a grade.

No love poem this morning
No love poem this afternoon
No love poem 
I just don't have it in me.

I'm just not feeling it. 

Sorry.

I recorded the poem on my phone in the dead of night on an app I had never used. The app would stop recording every time I paused, so my words are in little 10- to 15-second audio snippets in little boxes stacked pretty randomly on my phone screen. Two days later, while I was transcribing the poem, I would touch the phone screen occasionally to scroll to the next tier of boxes. Each time I touched the screen, the boxes would shift around like some sort of Tetris game gone rogue. By the end of the  transcription, I had completely rearranged the order of the boxes and hence, the sentiments of the poem. But the poem is here in its original form. 

And I'm taking a different antibiotic now -- one that allows me to sleep more soundly so that I don't experience as much REM sleep or maybe just don't get as involved with my dreams as I was during the first round of medication.  I guess that means the drug is working to heal me. And I kind of love that. 

Copyright 2023 ksFerguson