Jan 01 2009
I slept my way into the future
It’s a new year. I dreamed there was a sort of crisis- terrible weather, wet, clumping snow and rain all at once, freezing and piling up and seeping into the good dry places- and the homeless people had nowhere to go, nowhere to go. And so there were emergency shelters set up, stretches of concrete that fell below overhangs, a cold breeze blowing from outside, and you could sleep there- but once you were in for the night, you were in- and a loose fence fell to the ground and humorless cops paced the facilities and harassed, harassed everyone, and looked into your eyes as if you’d committed a crime, and you could not help but feel that you had. And I- when faced with the cop I pulled out my wallet and showed him my picture ID- “I am not really homeless,” I said. “I mean, I have nothing against these wonderful homeless people” (and here his mood lightened) “but I was only trapped here, looking for refuge from the rain when the fences went down.”
And then a friend and I cooked curried lentils for all the people, bewildered in the enclosure, nowhere to sleep and only cold, drafty concrete. We cooked the biggest pot of lentils and we sang the recipe for curry, naming the strange and numerous spices as if they were words we’d made up, turning it into a sort of poetry, and everybody loved that.
And then I woke up.
