Possibly the Most Honest Thing I Have Ever Written Down:

I had to fight back tears on the train today
Remembering myself barefoot and
Half asleep beside you in your car
Those nights you used to drive me home.

East

A man calls for prayers outside the Islamic Center and I follow
His voice toward Mecca and into the frigid evening-
East
Toward the river and my run-down apartment,
East
Toward a lonely ocean,
East
From where my family came,
East
Toward Jerusalem and the stories I hear at Mass.


I haven't set foot in a church since March, it snowed then too.
It is always well into the afternoon when I wake on Sundays
And I drink tea under the sliver of western light
That, on occasion, enters my living room
While the last services close at Immaculate Conception.

A bit more about dreams

The zombie dreams have returned. I've probably told you about them. They come randomly, every few months or so. I still don't know what they mean. They are markedly sadder this time and lack the campy movie bravado of the past. Now, people are forced to watch as their loved ones are changed and destroyed. In the last dream, a man killed his own (undead) daughter with his bare hands in order to save my life. Then he held me as if I were a child again. But I'm not a child, in dreams nor here now, and although it wasn't real, I could feel the weight of that much sacrifice.

Things were really tough and I felt bad, so today I bought myself a teddy bear with a little white scarf, but every time I turn my back the dog tries to eviscerate him, and I think maybe that's a good metaphor for something or other.

Do your best to make these things real

Today I waited for hours in the center of the Ben Franklin Parkway. Police barricades had stopped traffic and it was too hot for October. By the time the sun fell behind the trees my back was sore from standing on the pavement and my calves ached from reaching on tiptoe to see past the heads of the people in front of me, to see the man on stage.

Then everything froze as a few familiar harmonica cords were played and, all together, tens of thousands of people began to sing every word of "Thunder Road". The voices began hesitantly, just a low murmur over the parkway of people breathing...

Roy Orbison's singing for the lonely, hey that's me and I want you only, don't turn me home again, I just can't face myself alone again...

But the Boss told us to "Go ahead, take it" and with this permission the sound grew, words that I have had in my memory for as long as I can remember music...

You can hide 'neath your covers and study your pain, make crosses from your lovers, throw roses in the rain, waste your summer praying in vain for a savior to rise from these streets...


It was one of those rare, surreal moments where your surroundings seem to vanish and you're caught up, for a little while, in the music and the idolatry and the lyrics that seem to speak your own sorrow. It was like falling in love for just a few moments or leaving everything behind, like Mary climbing into her lover's car to look for the promised land on a deserted road somewhere across the river from here.

One night I dreamed of an angel: I walked into a huge, empty bar and saw him sitting in a corner with his elbows on the table and a cup of milky coffee in front of him. She’s the love of your life, he said, looking up at me, and the force of his gaze, the fire in his eyes, threw me right across the room. I started shouting, Waiter, waiter, then opened my eyes and escaped from that miserable dream. Other nights I didn’t dream of anyone, but I woke up in tears.


Before these past few months I've rarely remembered my dreams. I'd wake occasionally with a few images in my head or a fuzzy story but mostly there was nothing but sleep. I don't think I've had a nightmare since I was a child. Then I changed and they became constant and so real - the dull, pounding fear of finding myself stranded in foreign country with no money and no ticket home or the more piercing terror of the night I spent balanced on a rusty folded chair on top of a swaying and crumbling tower, the nausea and sorrow I felt watching a dog die on the bathroom floor of my fathers house, filling white towels with seeping blood, then the night I woke sobbing after listening to a friend tell me he hated me over and over in the coldest voice I've ever heard and I was unable to tell if I had dreamed it or really had received that terrible phone call.

I guess it seems strange to say, then, that I like this version better and never want to go back to those old, vacant nights.

In case of emergency I think the contents of my purse may be too revealing

So I'm cleaning it out, pouring onto the hardwood floor potato chip crumbs and two laundry claim tags...$2.67 in lose change, three packs of Orbit gum (one empty), four prescriptions, a bottle of aspirin and countless pharmacy receipts...a Moleskine with a pen that keeps coming uncapped...headphones and Raybans, a Citibank deposit slip and a water stained copy of Don Quixote...chamomile tea and dozens of tiny yellow post-it notes falling out like leaves sketched with phone numbers and scraps of poetry.