I dreamed I was an adult girlscout and the troop wanted to kick me out unless I quit smoking.

1. Gave my manuscript to Carolyn Forché, who did a really great job editing it. She took out all the articles and pronouns.

2. A very long dream with Ron Silliman in it, but I don't remember what happened.

Two nights ago: I was in a class being taught or T.A.'d by N (with whom I had a brief, stupid relationship), which was fine until I forgot to do an assignment and she had to reprimand me. Tim Midgett from Silkworm was also in the class, but he wasn't very helpful.

Last night: lots of dreams with faces from the past. In college with all the clowns from junior high. Parties. Big old house, arriving late? Just wanting to be left alone? Vivid then, gone now.

There is nothing so stomach-curdling as greeting an annoying coworker at the coffee pot and realizing that you had a dream about having sex with them the night before.

I was walking around the town I grew up in with Miss (Laurel) Peterson, my "pre-first" teacher (one of the only teachers I liked before 10th grade). Somehow we were the same age. The town may have been post-apocalyptic, or we both may just have been bummed out to be there. I asked her where she was from and she said "San Francisco." I said "I've always thought that was a better place for girls to grow up than for boys."

Fragments:

i look out the window / the catholic
church doors are open / no the whole
front wall of the church is gone

the service open to the public it's
a baroque performance / you can watch
it from the street / a pageant

it's kind of magnificent

in the church / food a feast / stolen
met someone / you were with me

women washing dishes in the church
kitchen / wearing only bras and slips!
they gossip / it's no big thing

i tell him / this is too much

(shoulda done this first thing this morning...but here goes)

Tom & I were wandering around a big factory/school in the desert. We were trying to get outside, but we kept ending up in these refinery/foundry-like settings. Finally we made it to a beach...with rocks you could swim to. A dear friend of mine was sitting on one of the rocks making (?) tee-shirts I think...she had also painted this wonderful watercolor of the factory...but in her rendering it looked like a beauiful old victorian house.
I had to go to the dentist. Someone gave me an address & convoluted instructions. I had to be buzzed into the office. When I got to the reception desk I was told that the doctor was out for another hour. I had Winnie (my cat) with me. Then it was like a dentist/vet visit. I sat down & read magazines...I kept losing track of Winnie. Then she kinda attacked a little kid. (this is probably due to the fact that winnie was sleeping on my head & expressing her feline love for me by resting her claws on my forehead). A good deal of time passed...the waiting room was getting really full. I threw a little mini tantrum at the receptionist. Then the doctor/vet showed up and went in her office with one of the people waiting. A woman next to me asked why I was there & I was stumped. I couldn't remember if I was there for winnie or me.

I found some binder clips where there had been no binder clips.

#1. Am giving 3 readings in some kind of large shopping mall. I have a bunch of conflicting documents stating the location and time of each reading. I am nervous because John Ashbery is supposed to be at one of the readings, for reasons that are not entirely clear. I stop into a restaurant of some kind to ask directions, only it is not a restaurant, but rather a sinister looking office with dark paneled walls and shiny floors. At a dark desk with a blue light above his head, Darth Vader style, is John Ashbery circa 1975. I ask him if he knows what time the reading is at and he says he doesn't know anything about any reading.

#2. I am employed by a University or School or something and for some reason G. is also employed by said institution. I go to visit her and ask what she is doing and she says she is researching "protocols for cloning" and that she only has 20 hours to finish up the project she is working on. I'm supposed to go somewhere to write this poem in several days and she agrees to accompany me. For some reason her father seems to have something to do with my being employed by this particular institution. The poem is called "Salomé of the Woods"

The trip to the woods takes place ala some kind of public transportation, though it looks kind of like one of those trains from the Edaville Railroad. Things at this point get kind of confusing. The poem itself is some kind of period piece, and I and my companion, who seems to have turned into K. and some sort of professor or "narrator" and another male companion seem to be simultaneously outside and inside the narrative at the same time. We are all in period garb a-lá Gangs of New York. There is some dispute over the portioning of some kind of food which we are eating, the male companion having consumed more than his fair share of the food (which looks something like barley or wheatberries). This results in an argument whereby the companion struts off into the forest in a huff. When the companion does not return, we go to try and find him. His severed head is found staked to a tree a short distance away. The professor explains that the forrest is haunted, and that I am responsible for the death of the companion for prompting him to go off alone into the haunted forest. I argue that it is the narrator's fault since he did not disclose to me the fact that the forrest was haunted.

"Oh but I did," the narrator explains, "but you didn't hear me because you were paying too much attention to K."

I ask K if this is true and she says that it is. "But you're the one who's narrating this thing, so therefore aren't you responsible for the acts which occur."

The narrator argues that he is an uninvolved third party and that I, ultimately, am responsible for the events which occur, which are also some how in the poem. He argues that ultimately I am the projenitor of the whole affair. At which point I state that if I am the creator of the events that occurred, then ultimately I answer to no-one since, being the creator of the situation, I am more or less absolved of guilt. The narrator argues that a textual murder is still a murder. I grab him by the hair and bash his head into a tree, causing his glasses to shatter and poke out his eyes. End of dream.

[OK, I feel the need to make a few comments. One, I've never read Salomé, though I do know there is some kind of severed head involved. Two, the events which occur in the woods in the dream take place in a state of complete unreality, it is clear to me in the dream that what is happening is part of a text of my own design. (Yes, I'm trying to account for that fact that my subconcious bashed some poor intolocutor's head into a tree. Three, I suppose I will have to write the "Salomé of the Woods Poem."]

I haven't fed my pet rat for a long, long time. He looks shriveled and skinny. I am furious at myself for forgetting to feed him for so long. And I can't find the rat food and I'm afraid to ask my mother where it is because then she will know how long it's been since I fed the rat. Ultimately, though I ask and she tells me where it is. I get the food and notice as I am taking it out of the bag with my hands that there are bugs in it. I don't have any other food, so I tell myself "rats eat bugs anyway."

I was in a town either west or north of the city, crashing at Phil's place. He and his roommate were having a weekend-long party but I wasn't there for it, just crashing. I was sleeping in somebody's room and in the morning kept waking up long enough to find a pen and paper to scribble down dream-poems. But I couldn't find a working pen and my eyes were too heavy to open long enough to tell my notebook from his, so I just kept falling asleep on my plans to write a series of poems involving the name "Phil."