dreamscape / i haven't slept in a few days / ramblings

untitled, mike caplin


naked she rolls around on a bed covered with newspapers giggling about the puppy she never had. she asks is it dark yet? because when it is she's going to get a tattoo. the phone rings (again) and no moves to answer it. she points to a small mark on her back you see this here , see that? that's how i know she says. a moment later rolls over onto her front and stares away thinking nothing and says it's too quiet too bad we don't smoke.

i have breasts you'll do whatever i ask, and i look up to see her. maybe she's right maybe you're right. she nods. i like it when its quiet i listen to too much music, far too much. i get up to make tea but instead walk into the backyard to stare at the pool. something i've never done before. whenever my stepdad comes home he asks did you try the pool? and i always shake my head, no, sorry. maybe next summer and when summer comes i ask an outcast if they wanna share a busfair towards the winter again. we take turns, one in the duffel bag in the storage compartment and one on the seat. we grow beards to look similar enough and no one seems to think much of it.
___this girl, attractive too, steps in front of me, hands around my neck groin against my thigh sex in her eye. everything girls. damn damn all everywhere soo damn beautiful sorry i have a girlfriend. can't even believe the words came out my mouth, but they're soo easy to say i thought i was breathing. half erect and the wetness of the tongue-kiss she placed on my cheek still tingling i walk on - it's my turn back on the bus anyway.

someone said we're going to karaoke so that's what i expected. but he stands up there and starts making odd noises he says he's singing the Beatles with the mouth of a tortoise. or a banshee. two hours and three vodkas later he's slumped on a red velvet couch and teary-eyed, though won't say why, and stares at the stripper climb up the pole damn she has muscular legs he mumbles and sips again. i try to kiss a girl with pretty lips but she's only teasing me i know that. gives me a gold-star-sticker worth of attention and eventually yawns and leaves what the hell am i doing here? i think and step away from the pool and walk back inside. without having made tea.
___what's that?
___a pen duhh
___i see that, what are you doing? [it's obvious, she's drawn all over herself]
___planning my tattoo
[in shaky font it says: LET THEM EAT CRACK up her arm]

when i come out my bedroom again it's 7am. mom and dad eat breakfast and bicker about spilt coffee and toasting more bread and hhhey, look who's up, how'd you sleep? i shake my head didn't. i take my glasses off and eat bread with nothing on it and stare at the cieling working through the process of entrenching restrictive procedures into state consitutions by means of matter and form provisions which specifically bind parliaments to adhere to burdersome requirements so that alterations to sacrosanct constitutional provisions are protected from successor parliaments and maybe even to put 'em in a treasure chest so that 'the vandal hands of political pirates' don't come near them. what are you saying? mom asks i've been mumbling to myself holding the bread up against my mouth. what?
___you're mumbling something about pirates.

we have pictures, one of my first halloweens , Africa maybe. no. America, we were in America then, i'm a pirate i remember my grandfather drawing a beard on my face with my grandmother's makeup. her bag smelled funny, like secret women's business. and i wore a bandana around me head and baggy scarlet pants and had a toy sword whatever happened to it god knows. of course my grandfather died and the makeup who cares. in the end it's the photos that always turn up. in your garage. between the pages of books. under your couch. you spend a lifetime trying to remember things and the whole while there's a photo somewhere in a shoebox that'll prove to you how faulty the image in your head is___ f*ck it this picture's all wrong the flowers were brighter than this i say. she holds the book open in her lap they're pretty bright q, it's alright. ___of course the toys all disappear. in the 99c store i see a plastic yellow baseball bat just like the one i had in Africa look mom look and she laughs too she remembers it. 5 hours later the storeclerk says listen, you wanna buy it or not we're closing up here? and teary eyed and mid-delerium i shake and shrug and he frows goddammit it's only a dollar while i shake back and forth like an Orthodox Jew on an El Al flight over Jordan as the sun comes up. it's only dollar. buy back your childhood here you go. yellow and plastic and cleaner'an ya remember

LET THEM EAT CRACK i shout and run out into the parking lot where the bus is stopped and my doppleganger is smoking a blunt with the fat single-mother he's been shagging when it's his turn in the storage compartment. i tried too but she prefers him you don't have his eyelashes she said. besides the bus a man on a milk-crate wearing a shirt tie admonishes me to come back to god or at least to have NORMAL BUT SPECIAL tattooed on my arm so i don't forget it meanwhile the television in the gas station says mediocrity is a sin and i can't handle the dichotomy so i ask to have another turn in the storage compartment
___hey? ___hey?
___what?
___come over later, we'll watch southpark. it's ok if you fall asleep ok?, i know you're tired.
___yeah.
___yeah?
___Yeah.

assignment all done? mom asks between mouthfulls of omelette and funny smelling coffee and throwing a few words at my stepdad about more toast. yah. about so. took long enough.
___get any sleep?
___nah.
___sleep when you're dead?
[i don't say anything] what?
[i smile:

dance while you're alive.