Kay Gabriel
from Perverts
So I’m a fucking aesthete
So I’m a pervert of exposed nerve experience
I’m sucking in air for a threshold feeling
like I dream I’m robbing a mail truck
as it passes through the mountains
I dream that Stephen’s at Riis and his
shirt is off, he’s doing pleasant things
with his face like raising his eyebrows
and smirking. Riis is Riis but it’s also a wave
pool. The sky was on fire and then it was more on fire.
I dream of a party I’m not supposed to be at
but that I’m sneaking into at 4 a.m.
to torment an incoming organizing committee
I’m taking dark strips of film and applying
it to my forearms as if it’ll disclose its secrets
or leave an imprint like acid but as a tattoo
on the body, it goes like this:
Shiv has a constant nightmare of a tsunami,
he believes I’m conducting a tsunami
from the shore looking like Tom Cruise
in Minority Report, actually I fixed the dream problem
normally he grabs the person next to him, like his
grandmother, or Trisha Low
in a separate cataclysm Becca dreams she’s
involved in an intense dom/sub
dynamic scene in the middle
of the combination French
Revolution and the voyage of the Titanic
where Mel Brooks is introducing, presenting
and screening his latest feature
later she dreams of writing fan mail to Brooks
in reply she receives a ripped package
of mass-market books and an empty
cigarette pack and really she’s inclined to blame me
is Mel Brooks still mayor of Williamsburg or are we faithful
in our good bad taste?
then her dreams are patterned after the people she shares
her homoflexible bed with, where Luke
talks in his sleep, and Becca remembers the following:
“But I’m a renegade”
“Can you big-spoon
me in five minutes”
“Yeah but it’s really nice
if you leave the windows
open there’s a sweet breeze”
“Okay but please don’t let
that drop on my head”
A couple days later, she adds:
“Please take care of the big baby”
Flush with news Greg writes
to say “we were all leaving Isaac’s”
to head to my house, this must have
been after Memorial Day when
I scoffed about unions that are less
than unions and left my bike
unlocked outside for hours
still there when I got out, a minor Bushwick miracle
in the dream Greg was walking alone
he noticed the top floor of an apartment building
across from mine was on fire, people
start to evacuate by ladder
he tried to call to me to ask if I knew
my neighborhood was burning down
but he was lying in the middle of the street
totally unable to move except for
holding the phone to his ear, doesn’t
remember a voice on the line but whenever he tried to talk
about the fire all he could manage was consciousness is
prisons too and woke up in that position
It could be worse
I could be an internet Maoist
marinating in my own joylessness
I could be pregnant and not want to be pregnant
I dream of three union meetings I’m either
attending or making people attend in my absence:
one with IATSE, one with SAG-AFTRA (in the dream
it was the same as NAMBLA), one with an electricians
union I couldn’t remember the name of
Fainan presides over one of the meetings
I forget which one, she says she’ll take notes
I head to Fire Island instead of the union
meetings and what does this say about my bourgeois taste?
I’m taking my shoes off to tread the filthy dock on purpose
then Chris the rave boyfriend was given a job as a train
conductor on a line where all the conductors are curators
and it’s a position that passes from non-serious
hands to non-serious hands: Hannah is one, and Addison,
and Tracy. I’m supposed to be one but I don’t
get the application in on time
the train is run by university administrators
who the team of curators and agitators
wants to fuck over
they arrange for the destruction of a railway
bridge over a valley so the train
will fall and the university will receive
a ticket. The bridge is destroyed
the train falls and is covered in white
paint—but the curators are blamed
rather than the university, I think we’re all
gonna lose our jobs