Moonchild Plays with the Cat (Dream Fast I)

"Before becoming a fully-functioning member of adult Ojibwa society, the Ojibwa adolescent male undertakes a dream fast and undergoes prolonged social isolation and food deprivation. During these dreams, the young man gets powers from a supernatural guardian spirit in exchange for promises to do or not to do certain acts in the future. He must avoid contact with the earth during the fast, and so he climbs into a tree and perches in a nest specifically built for this purpose. The dreams that occur during this ordeal are the most important experiences of the young man's life and are said to determine the course of the rest of his life."

- Sharon Packer

The moonchild—

She dreams in quiet silence
Until cracked craters and cosmos in reverse
Give way to water and gathering dust (of God knows what)
Over solitary islands fenced off in the void
Where the maw of a black hole slowly chews and grinds a tree root.
And above the canopies just over the stream
Stalks the GREAT B—But shhh
Don’t ask him where he keeps his claw
(Between you and me,
It’s right up in the sky,
Right next to the moonchild’s eye

The Siamese cat—

The one with the Siamese brain
That wells up in its eyes
And leaks out of its nose
As if someone pulled the plug out of a bathtub
(You know, the cat that casts his shadows
over the endless shifting dunes?)
He dreams in waterbirths and ancient temperatures
And dead branches with pretend hands
That grope through constellations cut out of the static
Grabbing at claws or clawing out eyes
Either way, they are staying away from that
(oh no, anything but that)

Bird Brain

Simulated Dream II (From the Folds)

Every bird's wing can avoid decaying when mummified in humble Kosher salt. It can be purified by a machine placed in parallel to your ear--"I don't know why exactly birds sing either, but I can hear them loud and clear with this thing! But if you push this contraption any deeper it'll burst into a flower that will bloom into either the one gesture you choose for the fingers of Baby Jesus, or a gun. It's impossible to tell which."

"But if I concentrate hard enough, I know I can hold them both at bay. Just furrow the folds of your brow into the pages of a book entitled SHHH: A Novel. Too bad its pages are filled with angry hands. All they want to do is fight and they feel most comfortable in a fist, their thumbs are a mystery to them. I hope that one day they get the courage to climb out of the sentences, run across my spine, and hurtle through the air--shedding their dirty, dirty skin and the marrow in their bones before diving into a Tupperware container doing its best to saturate the potential of all the ancient skies."

(But their aim must be precise, because the icy water wants them right back where they belong.)

Simulated Dream I (Build Your Own Coffin)

I know, I know—you’re happier without a head.

I remember how you told me that magpies can’t fly that high, but I once saw a flock of them overtake a giant, generic severed hand in the sky that was plunging a spoon into the primordial soup whose beach was bordered by a parade of half-cracked eggs making their fragile pilgrimage to the exact spot on the slim back of a young boy where his body fused with that of a deer.

A seventeen year-old cicada mistakes the deer’s nose for the trunk of a tree, crawls up it, sinks it’s claws in, and sheds his first skin to transform into a tidal wave that crashes down upon the deer’s brow where it is crested by the prow of a sacred ship made from locust wings.

The Head of the Hunted sprouts berries in a thorny bramble and in its mouth it chews the bones of a marionette whose sad blood drips into distilling prisms that create a field, a field forever sailed by 9 lost members of the Spanish Armada forgotten by Time. They endlessly sail away from the horizon as it folds away behind them into a million replicated profiles from which sprouts a tree of laminated pine. There you must go to pick and peel your coffin.

I’m sorry, but that’s the way it has to be.

The Door in the Attic

The whole sequence of images can be seen on my facebook.