a sleep with no dreams

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__put pen to paper,
__drag the ink of my soul across lines

____M. Tansik







b2, Kenshi Daito

You are my perfect title. I have tried a few times to work with you. to somehow fold up all my meanings, abbreviate all my words and fit them into you: a sleep with no dreams. The first time I wrote you over and over in my notebook, 15 pages of just 4 repeated words and a vowel.

a sleep with no dreams. A sleep with no dreams. a SLEEP with no DREAMS. a sleep with no dreams. aa sslleeeepp wwiitthh nnoo ddrreeaammss.. a sleep with no dreams. A SLEEP WITH NO DREAMS. a sleep. (with) no dreams. dreams. sleep no with.

(like that). Then I took to drawing odes to you. Pages of it my notebook. I drew in silhouettes, black shapes and white shapes only. A lighthouse. Clouds. Another page is just colored in black. Then, before I slept, I would lie and hum you to myself. I would imagine if it could be possible, an evening of formless black shapes growing and dispersing and dissolving and growing again without interruption. No images, no names, no stories. Just black, and all the different colors that that black can be. (Your hair). my eyes. my new perfectly black somewhat shiny undies. Walking into the ITC auditorium first thing in the morning with all the lights off. That miserable plane-ride from Vienna to Chicago... ten hours stuck in that dark. Can I find a way to do it? To reduce it all to silence? To what it really is?

*___*___*

Crouched on four legs it sits. I don't know whose job it is to polish the wood, but I have taken to doing it myself. I have a rag (it's my heart). Some mornings I'd walk down the stairs to do it... in silence of course. It's funny how you grow slowly reverent of these objects. I made a ritual of it, rubbing it in sensual motions, slowly, never too hard. Its black grew darker and darker. imagine, before my very eyes, the making of a black-hole. The lights in the room would be attracted to it- it'd grow dark, and the floor and ceiling would creep towards it. I'd be its closest satellite. I'd get down on one knee to rub up the legs, towards the parts of the piano no one touches. It's an erotic position- I should know, I've been there with women before. I can't handle it for too long, I stand, unable to move.____I lift the lid, scared of her white teeth. Scared of the numbers I see written on them. Possibilities. Statistics. Scared of the history of the men and women whose fingers have touched these keys. The Tutakhamon curses that may have followed them... the Petit Prince's stardust miracles they may have glimpsed between the cracks of the keys. My perfect beauty. My most favorite object.

*___*___*

After an extended period of gestation, one afternoon, having realized I lost the postcard you had given me for my birthday- the last physical piece of you I had left, I began a short story.

a sleep with no dreams.
(a short story) by a penny for the old guy.

I thought it would be... my greatest achievement. Anthropomorphism, monologues, extended metaphors, brutal realism. A fragmented piece written about red-wood trees and lost birds and a frost-bit morning and a lone-driver with tea-stains on his teeth. ____It turned out to be... opaque. obtuse. No one followed it. No one got it. It was my Titanic. My lost postcard sank with the story... I've forgiven one of those things, but cannot forgive gravity for the second.

*___*___*


MY MEMORIES FROM THE PIANO AT THE BACK OF THE AUDITORIUM

1. Anna Jane Resnick, and her bassoon, sitting besides the piano she played her bassoon. I think the instruments had requested to be near each other.
   
   
2. Justin had moved his gym-set into the projection room- no one knew about this of course but I. At 4pm he would go and work out, I would keep watch, make sure no one heard the weights vacillate. I played mostly Bach at first... just to acquaint myself with her. When people came, something loud- Brahms, Khatchaturian. It seemed to embarrass people, the noises she made. They would walk away. Of course it was to cover-up the sound of the weights and the groans of the man lifting them. (when no one was looking Kabalevsky. when I was sad the Poet Dreams by Schuman. when I was feeling unoriginal Chopin.)
   
   
   
3. You fell in love with the sounds my fingers made I think, before you fell in love with me. But it happened, there. In the back of that stage. I hear your heels click as you walked in. You almost never speak above a whisper anyway, pianissimo-you, you seemed to understand the reverence. I improvised for you. it was in a-minor. A Gregorian plain-chant sort of theme I had in mind, and some technical variations on it. Later, much later, you would video-tape me improvising those same themes. Thankfully that tape is buried somewhere in Brisbane, where the brutal sun is eating at plastic and history and my fingers and the love in dark air, and the romance of it, and the erotic piano swooning as it carved fantasy-histories out of ivory keys, and implicit-curses out of ebony ones.
   
   
   
4. My three favorite goof-ball friends, one aged 71, the other two 30-somethings:
   
   - what! you?
   - yes.
   - NO! _Y_O_U_play the piano?
   -yes.
   - you're kidding.
   - what the hell dude! I play! why's that so hard to believe?
   - cause... you're you!
   - he's kidding.
   - no!, I don't think he is. Let's settle this right now.
   - now?
   - yes.
   - you game?
   - get up chump.
   
   
5. When you were sad, it only happened once or twice, when you were sad you'd call me. "I'm sad."
   "oh no."
   "will you?"
   "um... when?"
   "...now?"
   "sure. why not."
   
   and you'd walk up. and then you did the most amazing thing, you would crawl under the piano, lying on the floor, staring at her undies. I stared at you... wanted to tell you I understood... Beethoven had done the same thing. That the floor does actually move when the piano sings... that... the body feels music physically (and spiritually... and in every other lly)... I think I may have just smiled at you. I was unshaven this last time. Tired, not having slept for days. I was editing the novel at nights, dreaming of Love, and all the places Love had led me (and back to square one at that!). So there I was, dark green trousers, a shirt and tie... black Converse shoes... hair a mess, a terrible haircut I had gotten in China, you lying on your back staring at the black stars of the piano's ass-crack, and me and my fingers weeping.
   
   
   Just so you know: it was a pleasure to play for you. Each time. Every time. All the time(s). Any time.
   

*___*___*

The second time it was a poem. It was a myriad of poems, with different names, different concepts, but the color of their eyes (all of them), was you, was a sleep with no dreams. Sometimes I would annotated it:

a Sleep With No Dreams
a story. (about trees)
by A.P. Oldguy

a sleep with no dreams.
a story about trees,
______and wind
______and stars that we bump out heads against at night
A.P. Oldguy

I'm not kidding. Check my notebook. I would annotate it to try and approximate the meanings... to attempt in a rudimentary way to express the idea of it. The idea of me (me!) lying down to sleep... at peace. sound. safe. silent. in a bed that was my home. in a stable, dark, beautiful place... where I could close my eyes and not see.

And I failed. (like all those other things too).

And then the notebook for that year ended. and this thing... never got finished.

Dear: sleep with no dreams, I am sorry to have failed you. I am sorry I never quite managed to get you right... to delineate you beautifully enough. I am sorry to have fingered at your dress and hair and bra-strap for soo long without ever just holding your hand in mine, and lifting it, and kissing it, and then putting it down and staring at you, and being man enough to do it- to repeat the process with your lips. I am sorry I never quite understood what you meant to me in order to explain it to other people. I am sorry you mean soo many things to me.

Most of all,
I am sorry to still not have had you, just one sleep with no dreams.