Places In Which I Dream

These moist lands, haze with forgetfulness. Daytime is like dusk, everyday slumbering grey with someone’s immediate drunkenness towards abandon. Where is my father? This is not his land. He was baked in his brown and dusty home of Okalahoma. His people cleared dried and caked sorrow from their mouths, to utter powerful and mysterious words that would release them from their captivity.
No, this must be my mother’s land, more like it, emerald isles, where, too, they drink to die, for a while. Is this the place I belong, on her side?

Port, land too lush with life, the seizing of a young man’s ideas. Me caught in a battle between the ocean and mountain. This is the land where the living come to be buried in a grey season for a thorough war of dreariness.
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Portland, you green, lush whore, something to be recognized in my own bed! Quit me, or I you, before I take the living to my father’s land.

Portland

He is here, and it is raining. It is Portland. He begins sadly with his protrusile lips to tell me about his yesterday, (in the rain, it is the saddest time to tell a story of a life); on these moist days he will look at me, indicate the dark sky and say, “We need oxygen to breathe. But only when you think about it.”