You Have Strong Feelings about Terre Haute, Indiana

What is baseball, really, but a group of guys who are out there fighting for their lives to keep a dream alive, a dream they know they can never let die?

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Last night I dreamed I was teaching a poetry class. We met in a busy, noisy cafeteria. I couldn’t hear anyone, and no one could hear me.

And I didn’t know how to read the poems, because they were written in rubber and plastic on all sides of different household objects, like a drill and measuring tape. And I’m not sure what other object—I could picture it a minute ago, but once I started writing this down I lost it. I can’t remember.

When I tried to read the poems, I couldn’t tell what was poetry and what was instructions for using the objects. I couldn’t tell the difference between the two.

I guess that in the dream there was no difference. The poems weren’t written on the objects, they were the objects.

There could be something to be learned from this, but I’m not sure.

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I used to have a lot of teaching dreams, about rooms full of students who didn’t listen to a word I said, who carried on full conversations while I tried to tell them things I thought were important. Their faces barely concealed the smiles they smiled at my expense. I was a joke to them.

I had these dreams because that was what my real life was like.

I don’t teach anymore.

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Yesterday morning, I finished reading the surrealist novel The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington.

It’s about a very old woman in Mexico who gets a hearing trumpet. A lot more things happen after that.

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I made a playlist, recently, of songs that are loud and that sound sort of angry. I thought I’d listen to them while I wrote something that’s loud and sort of angry.

One of the songs is “Aenima,” by Tool, which is about how the guy singing it wants Los Angeles to be destroyed. I don’t think I like the song, but I think at one time I thought I did.

I was going to say something now about how that singer now owns a vineyard, which would suggest that he must have changed his mind about California. But I looked it up, and the vineyard is in Arizona. So maybe he still wants to destroy Los Angeles.

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Maybe I’ll write a song about how I want to destroy Terre Haute, Indiana.

Probably not. I don’t really have strong feelings about Terre Haute, Indiana