Dreamscapes For Tomorrow

Dreamscapes For Tomorrow

I had been searching for some meaning
in a world that did not make sense. I decided
to write down a series of my tormented dreams in a special little
book........pretty soon
these illusions, these dreams started to become reality, and I began a
long and
treacherous series of adventures..........

City Lights Bookstore: a window.

The mirror of the universe has many reflections; several different
ways to view
the inner recesses of the mind. Thoughts
flow through the mind like water passing over
rocks in the eternal river of life. But, there
has become a crack in the mirror of the reflection. Reality has become
bent in the
darkness of paths lost on the horizon.

We had been driving down highway one
in California. Alison started down the road
towards San Francisco. Alison screamed
into the night of eternity, the long night of the abyss in the soul.
The red jaguar
swerved against the guardrail; bouncing
us against each other as the car passed
into the next lane.

"I don't want you to leave Rob.
I don't want you to go back to San
Francisco."

"I have to Allison. I have a feeling
of redemption that I can only find
inside the city lights of the city."

To view the mirror of the universe,
the essential steps in the ever-changing
prison of the soul should be taken. The
mirror of the soul has many reflections
that bounce off one another. Close your
eyes and listen. The sounds of the universe may be heard. Sounds
flow
into the void. Listen to the silence and
Satori may be found.

The van sped onwards into the brightness of the California
highway.
We had found one another on the winding highway of life, but like
some
bad dream turned into itself, our nightmare was turning upon the
paradigm
of the moment.

Next I find myself floating eternally
in the grey beauty of the sea. To see
the wonderous glowing creatures sinking
before my eyes would light the heart
of my inner soul. Sinking below into
the farthest depths of the sea, our inner
most destiny of meaning would be discovered; the salvatiion of the
human
species might be found in the churning
waters of creation.

My next dream, I am standing by the
tracks of dawn listening to a train that
comes in the early morning; the train
that never comes awaiting to the sounds
of days howling in a night where I called
to no other name in that unforgiving night of some lost song of
rememberance calling. I think of Neal
Cassidy poetic leader of the beats, the
cliche goes onwards once like some memory from a victorian song.

Why do they kill themselves. They
look down into the inner most depths
of man. I saw visions from Haight
Ashberry and saw the children considering suicide in the darkness
of
the night; lovers passing by the old
railroad tracks; sometimes feeling like
the world is coming down and feeling as
if I was a guy on a traintrack nineteen
years old, knowing not what they intend
to do with my life; I just sit on a traintrack seeking change. I have
found
out what happens when the children die.
There is no fading like the flowery language of a Dicken's novel, where
death seems sweet; having fallen from the dews wrapped around the foggy
mists of an ancient English moor.

It is time to awaken, remembering
moments when we would fall downwards
into the abyss of the soul bleeding. So,
I wandered until I found a cafe. Sometimes, I like to sit in old
worn-out places with a traditional kind of feel to
them that takes a person in, as if they
were a spectator on the fringe of some
ancient long forgotten sporting event;
where place and time stand still in a
managerie of space, and for an instant it seems possible that those old
hands
of father time can turn backwards until
we become encompassed in our memories melting into the worn out pages
of a scrapbook of mind and sound. I search for the coffee shop of
memory, of a made up mythos, where
hipsters clad in black sit amongst tables
surrounded by steaming coffee and cigarette smoke; the books of the
day
lying in an upheavled heap, whose words
appear to float up into the air mixing with
an array of sound from the jazz band,
complete with trumpeter, piano, drums,
keeping time to an old bass guitar.

My dream started in the aftermath of the wake of morning. We had all
been
sleeping in the library, all of the bums
in the small town of Deliverance, U.SA.,
seeking the solace of another day falling
into an array of neverending dreams.
Deliverance, U.S.A. is a typical American city. All the bums in
Deliverance had been sleeping in the library that day. They were
escaping the
heat of the afternoon sun. Sometimes
all of the bums would take quiet naps;
until the police would come with their
nice shiney silver badges to awaken them from their personal
slumberings.
The police were dressed in the light
green uniforms of the California Highway Patrol. They wore bright
badges that
caught the sunlight in a prism of color
that would have made old Sir Issac
Newton proud. All of us were rejects
of some calibre or another; and were
seeking redemption in Deliverance for
our past sins. The police in Deliverance were there to monitor us, and
not allow us to sleep.

We were forced to stay awake for hours. Some of us had been up for
days, myself going on a typical 48 hour stretch without sleep. The
library never closed. It was open 24 hours a day;
bum heaven; but there was only one
rule: we were never allowed to sleep.
I sat in a nice thick plush chair, staring up at the sign that hangs on
the wall.

No SLEEPING
IN The
LIBRARY

My eyes were growing heavy in the mid-morning quiet that comes with the
break
of day in Deliverance.

Lenny the poor young queer boy, who has run away from his
troubled
childhood in New York City, sits in the
corner wearing the worried expression of the damned who have come to
Deliverance; for we each belong to the
damned in our own special way; having made a special hell of our own
making here on the planet earth. Lenny has been awake for days. There
are dark
rings underneath his eyes. His teeth
are chattering, as he watches the security guards waiting for the next
bum to fall asleep in his arm-chair. They walk around the library with
hard roving
eyes.

"Do you think that they are
coming for us ?", says Lenny....
"Do you think that they are going
to get us.....?"

"It's ok, Lenny. Don't worry
about it; everything will be
alright."

Sitting in the gymnasium, I found
myself becoming a spectator to the
comedy of life; that innate representation creating boundaries
into
the human condition.

Blues In E-Minor

Remembering nights by the Old
Chlesea Hotel,

When we would hold one another
In passion,

Underneath a full moon
Rising in the west,
A fall night's wind blowing
Flowers through your hair.

Outside the jazz club of youth
The piano player hit solid,
Those black and white keys
In E-minor:
Slow jazz filtering
The soft blue cafe light,
Smoke over scotch glasses
Unknown elixers of love.

And, we held each other
In the playfull innocense
Of fall-time lovers,
Our kiss held together
Forever by memory,
And E-minor Coltraine stanzas
Played softly over rocks,
Burnt ashes of night.

Imagine a world filled with streams
of people in endless tuxedos, women
stepping from the doors of black
limozenes, running into a specturm
of another night's endless beginnings.
A sidewalk full of sounds. To see a
car running into the highway of America
reborn, underneath the purple light
flashing into blue neon, rhythmatic poetry in motion. Where is the
progression of stairways ? the next cigarette ? Pictures turn into
sounds in one long line of forgotten memories.
I dreamed I saw your face in the mirror
of my life and watched reflections bend
inwards past eyes caught in memoriium of a Tennysonian poem. I saw
your
face passing into the dream of light
blinded by the passion of love. White
woman, Black woman, Hispanic woman. I have loved you all. Give me
the flesh of night, the wine of desire;
a golden cup of deliverance painted by
the illusion of the mind comprehending
the reality of being, alienation.

Time stands in the background represented by the wooden clock,
near
the top of the stairs; and we unknowingly walk upwards towards those
lofty precipes of the mind. I once
stood for three hours, watching the hands turn inside the glassened
boxed
in case; realizing that we see symbols
to the mysteries of life hidden beneath
those hands. Two chairs sit inside the
room, and my friend and I from the
early Beat days of the eighties sit by
the one hundred year old fireside
discussing books of past ages; our cold
and tormented past. Larry had been a
good and tormented past. Larry had
been a good streetwise kid, who lost
his innnocense when he became lost
in the streets of San Francisco one summer afternoon. He was
nineteen
years old. Now, he spends his days
waiting on the hands of time, remembering old things: lost
lovers,
relatives, visions. Where do we store
the remenants of the past ? What do
we do with memories too painful to consider in the wake of the morrow
?

"There is not God, you know.....",
says Larry, as he gazes out of the half
empty window, watching the sunlight
hit the open streets of the city pavement. The white sidewalk and
the
streets of life merged in an ever-present nightmare.

His friend, Lloyd, some older man
with white hair and a beard sits beside
of him staring out of the same window.
We are all three of us sitting in that
small room in San Francisco in heavy
plaid shirts and blue jeans, breathing
in the cool mid-morning air from the
bay harbor. There are times in San
Francisco, when a person can sit or
stand for hours tasting the salt from
the pacific ocean, as it hangs on the
top of cool early-morning breezes, as if
supported by angel's wings, before
falling listlessly into the slowly dawning
mid-afternoon streetscape, some lost
avenue of dreams, past responses,
covered over by the dreams, past
responses, covered over by the steps of
hurried businessmen, stockbrokers,
beautiful women in professional attire,
lost ladies of the evening heading for the safety of apartments, hotel
rooms until
the nightmare of night begins again.
They are seeking the next taxi-cab, the
next ride, another step away from the
movement of merging traffic, where
they will pass away like some illusion
melting into some mirage created by
the heat of day. The older man is
the cynical philosophical sort; and
gives Larry conversation and song. The
wine has been flowing from the bottle
of mirth all through the night. Classical
music blares in the background, resembling some insane rhapsody rolling
over continuously inside songs left over
from some earlier era lost in the ages
unmemorable. Mad conversations have
been going on throughout the evening
all night long. Lloyd has been enjoying
the turmoil, some intellectual swordplay
of the mind. Larry cannot take much
more, and I reach for the bottle of whiskey hidden underneath teh
book
cabinet. Soon the city will be returning to life with all of her
madness, and Larry will not be able to cope with such
circumstances of the moment.

"Of course there is a God.", replies Lloyd half laughing as he
holds
Larry's hand, whispering to him cliche's,
random phrases that seem to torture
Larry in a hardened unyielding grasp."

"God is all around us son."

"There is no God Lloyd.", Larry
screams in the aura of his soul, the
soft dying of his soul; his shrieking voice descending over the
brickened
structures of dawn. I pass the bottle;
prefering silence.

The Vatican is a city unto itself.