The Dream

One night I killed someone

in a dream, but in the dream

I didn't take it seriously--

it was an accident, I could explain--

until I saw in my dream-mother's eyes

that everyone would leave me

and what's more, despise me.

Everyone, you see. Everyone.

No one would see my side.

All we ever have from humans, anyway,

is first impressions, fleeting admiration,

a fragile reputation, opinions based on

blessedly limited knowledge of us.

Once those are lost, no value remains

except to give ourselves away:

a martyrdom of humanistic altruism;

but even that, I knew, would be

unwanted from a murderer.

Listen: you think some people love you,

but there is always some evil you could do

to ruin their love--irreparably, forever.

Human relationship is a tragic wisp of smoke.

I learned all this in a dream and woke

in a cold sweat, gut-clenched weeping,

trying to dream-explain my way back,

desperate for a scent of mercy,

a hint of understanding, recognition.

Decades later, after everything,

my life is now quite like it was

in a dream, but in the dream,

eventually I was allowed to wake.









August 2022

Obituary

 Ross Morinalo died of a massive heart attack when he couldn't have been over 60, and the last time I talked to him I tried to sell him Aflac insurance.  The time before that when I last talked to him was maybe ten or 15 years earlier, when I was a kid.  He taught Sunday school one year and I remember he was very excited one Christmas to hand out little plastic miniatures of USS Starship Enterprises from Star Trek, which is something I'd never heard of before.  It was either that, or the little die-cast model airplanes that I had as a kid.  I remember having two: one was a blue Navy plane and the other was a white model of an F-15.  Maybe he gave us both, maybe different years or something.  The blue plane was my favorite, between the two. I lost it, somehow.  I had the white one for years and years, even as the plastic bits chipped off and the paint peeled off the metal.  But that blue one was my favorite. 

One time I had to drive somewhere with Ross Morinalo in a big moving van for something related to church.  The other men were going in cars; it was dusk; Ross said he'd take me along because I had young eyes and he didn't see as well anymore at night.  I think of it a lot of times when it's getting dark out and I can't see the road as well as I used to--how I'm becoming more like Ross and less like the kid in the passenger seat of that big truck.  I kept an eagle eye on the road that trip, but he pointed out something on the drive that I hadn't seen, and I carry that sense of failure too, inside, even though I lied to him in the moment and said I'd seen it too, of course, because I was ten and he'd given me die cast airplanes, or space ships, or something.

Ross ran a cleaning company that maybe sold janitorial supplies, or maybe they were the janitors for big buildings, or maybe a mix of both.  When I was down on my luck and trying to sell insurance--which I never successfully did, not once--I remembered this fact and looked him up and eventually got him on the phone.  He was a little annoyed to find out this ghost from his past, this kid from a Sunday school class now long, long forgotten, was just trying to sell him something; was not calling to say Ross had changed my life or that I remembered anything he'd ever said or had anything redemptive to offer him.  I remember I thought his wife was pretty, but I didn't mention that on the phone.  When we got through the formalities and novelties and I revealed that I was trying to sell him insurance, he sounded tired and said he was busy, and honestly now I really understand why, and I forgive him the slight offense it unreasonably caused me in the moment.  Hopefully he had good life insurance, though, because my parents told me he died a few years later, and I probably could have sold him a life insurance policy.

August 2022