22

I.
i send him flowers in the dream and i go into the woods to pass away,
the winter laying me down to sleep.

i awake from the dream only partially and hallucinate that i am in the middle of a customer service interaction, but my body is paralyzed so my mind experiences extreme anxiety as i struggle to tell my invisible bedside customer “THERE IS NOTHING I CAN DO FOR YOU, I CAN’T EVEN LIFT THAT BANANA. OH GOD I’M GOING TO GET FIRED”

II.
i weave pale hands beneath the empty thrill of indirect sunlight,
i take the leaves into my hands and render from them
a memorial for every tree.
a tree is never thoroughly dead.
the leaves come and go but everything else looks and stays the same
provided there is no freak storm or a movie couple carving some freak shit
in the side of the tree.
imagine if humans were never thoroughly dead.
imagine if the bodies of humans remained intact and our hair just fell in and out,
in and out, threading through the follicles “like woah” and “for eternity”

III.
a graveyard could be a place where our feet are cemented into the ground
and we are like sturdy scarecrows forever, our hair collecting in piles across the land,
blowing across the street.
we could choose to donate our bodies to farmers to cut down on scarecrow costs.
people would come to mistake our hair blowing across the road for something else,
as they do with leaves.

for instance i often think a leaf blowing across the road is a large spider or small animal.

more importantly, people would come to see the piles of hair as beautiful, as indicative of something great and heavy with meaning.
they would rake the clumps of hair into ambitious piles and encourage children to play among the piles.
they would take pictures of children playing in the piles of hair,
and then their children would show their children and say “i too was once young”

IV.
i drive home from work and eat chocolate covered pretzels,
my thoughts heavy with delicious and
i am addicted to this reflex.
it is almost impossible to have a meaningful interaction at work because my being is so thoroughly steeped in

screaming children / repetitive tasks / every type of chef and non-chef shithead you can imagine,

that it is hard to shed the customer service skin in a timely manner.
for instance i said to a man “how are you” and then immediately after i said “good thanks” before he even said anything, answering my own question and feeling uniquely horrified. it is like that moment in every movie where the protagonist catches himself saying or doing something that is diametrically opposed to some value/idea of self, and he goes “OH GOD not this, what have i become, i am becoming {my emotionally distant capitalist dad, etc.}”

not that i am subverting some value or idea of self {always in flux}, but i am being compensated for pouring my mind into the mind-mold of the highly efficient and therefore not entirely present customer service rep, whilst becoming immune to comments about my name and how it’s spelled and how it’s the name of a famous politician lady and did i know that.

K comes through my line with wet hair, with an eight dollar bar of chocolate.
i know he doesn’t like chocolate and i know that the chocolate is for me.
i slide it across the counter to him anyway and then he slides it back, smiles
and leaves my place of work

V.
when i was a kid there was a game where we would close our eyes and imagine we wandered through a large house, encountering religious imagery and creepy things on the way
and the point was that the scenery would actually begin to unfold vividly behind your eyes.
my mother thought this was witchcraft but we were just entertaining ourselves
with elaborate phosphenes on the porch