The Devil's Strip Mall

Last night I dreampt I was the devil's

consort and I helped him lure people down to

hell. We worked out of this bitsy tiny

office, several rooms the size of

claustrophic closets that interconnected through

heavy doors and cornered entrances so waking [walking?]

through it you couldn't tell if there were

three rooms or five or seven; they all seemed

to overlap that way. It was all off this

large outer room or wall which is where I

ewould bring people in from and one

of the tiny rooms had an exit out, I

think just as a way to make it all a

littlle more humorous because the rooms

were so confusing nobody ever found it though

it was perfectly clear to see from the

big hall before you entered the cubicle

rooms and it was funny to watch all those

people sliding down to fiery eternity when

the escape was right there, bright and

obvious the whole time. Sometimes to make it

even better I would show them excatly

where it was as we toured through the

cubicle rooms but they never managed to

find it again on their own.

Bandages and Bread

You worked in a sandwhich shop in the middle of a graveyard, serving chunks of found and rotting flesh between slabs of bone-meal bread. The customers were ghouls and human haunters, you could always tell the dead from the alive by their face’s actions as they chewed: the living could never quite work their teeth and tongues around familiar flesh. The dead swallowed easily through swollen, goitered throats before melting down into guttering skeletons, the chunks of abandoned flesh they shed on the floor swept up into next day’s meat. You threw the skeletons out the howling door, swinging them back and forth before flinging them into the aftermidnight swirl of sharp-edged leaves.

You wake up in a pile of ashes. You wake up cold. You wake up shivering and missing the sinewy tension of your high-school lover’s arms. You wake up to the buzzing anonymity of centrally re-circulating air. You wake up alone.

Siamese

01.20.200510.29.1999I dreampt I built a world of feathers and bottle caps for us to rummage through, and we slept in gently heaving tunnels of birds-wings and ladybugs and hot wet air. I dreampt you were Siamese twins with one mouth latched to each of my breasts,sucking my nightmares through my nipples and you murmured in nightsick stereo around your grotesque mouthfulls, "now isn't that better?" but I could see my terror turning evil filling up the blank spots around the pupils of your eyes and just as I was sure I was going to vomit you moaned in a breathy, full tummy sort of way and I felt my bones falling dryly together and my last thought was the realization that all this time, the only thing that had been filling me up was nightmares.