Timeball

Timeball is the furthest possible evolution of baseball played in the distant future by post-humans cranked out on a steroid called Yum Yum Fracas (possible side affects include spontaneous life tripling & disloyal gums). The ball is pitched at near light speed, and upon impact with the bat breaks through the time barrier and into the past, far into the past if you've got a good hitter.

There are no set rules for scoring in timeball. Rather, the ball changes the course of history in its entire (sometimes through the butterfly affect, sometimes by hitting famous galaxy leaders in the head and thoroughly killing them), and the goal is to change ths history to one where your team currently has the higher score.

It is standard for the team roster, language, religion, and occasionally body shapes to change drastically throughout the course of a game.

The game is over when a player stops Timeball from ever having been invented.

Dream #4

I wrote the basics of this dream the moment I woke up sometime last spring. I have since filled out that skeleton with proper grammar, lucid sentence structure, and some details that have eked their way from my memory.
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I am at some type of camp, though what type specifically is wildly unclear. (Maybe for young singers?) It consists of a gaggle of twenty-somethings (at times supervised by our parents and a shadowy camp leader) in a large house with 3.5 bathrooms. The only other person I recognize at camp is a girl I’ve seen around but had relatively little contact with.

I’m having a fine time at camp (doing who-knows-what) until one day I find out that we are headed to Hawaii in the next twenty minutes. I don’t have a bathing suit with me, and rush upstairs to grab one. We all share the top floor, which is a wide open room with closets lining the wall. The floor is covered with shoes, and I lunge over them to try to get to my distant closet. Though I am the only camper up there, a friendly but demanding midget appears to give me very straightforward fashion advice, at one point pulling off my bright yellow shirt and running to the closet to fetch something else. As he runs he holds the shirt above his head by the sleeves, hiding his tiny body behind its yellow billows.

Suddenly we are in Hawaii, though I only know this through dream intuition, as we never leave a remarkably similar large house. I am in the basement kitchen, cooking a meal with the girl. (At this point it seems the camp might teach young people cooking). We each work on our own dish, and at the bottom of my vision there is a readout recording points for the quality of my cooking & immediately translating those points into a Navy Rank. I want to become a high enough rank to date this girl, who apparently is a high-ranking officer.

I do something fancy with onions in the stir-fry I’m cooking, and my points go up to 44 (Admiral). This rank means that this girl and I can be together, and while she seems quite happy about this, she almost immediately uses the avocados on the table in her dish. This significantly lowers my rank, because much of my 44 points rested on the possibility that I would still use avocados in my dish.

We return to the states, and the camp is in a very late stage. We meet in the special back meeting room of a high-class bar. The room is huge, and our parents are all waiting at a long table in the center of the room. The entire room is intimately lit, dark shadows playing across the mahogany surfaces of nearly everything. As we enter, our eyes are drawn to a long line of mailboxes where we are to send and receive messages.

The camps shadowy leader emerges from the background and tells us to look at the wall behind us. We turn and see a giant portrait made completely from tiny grains of black and white sand. The portrait is basically the heads of every member of the camp photoshopped onto the bodies of famous opera singers, all in one big dining hall. Our shadowy leader tells us that we have been placed next to those we sing the best with. Then he tells us the whole portrait is a piece of shit, and that we can do better with a solid group effort. He blows on it, and the sand whirls away, leaving only an empty grey square.

We are divided into two groups, and each group is given a secret hideout. At this point I leave my own perspective and start watching a man I will call Ernest (this is not his real name, but when he has his face it looks like that of Ernest from the “Ernest goes to ________” movies from my childhood).

Ernest is a member of the other group. He wakes up on a beach, though I cannot tell where. He presses his face into the sand, and from the abnormal and terrifying imprint left therein realizes he has no skin on his face, only a bare skull. In a fit of ill-informed ingenuity, Ernest breaks into a series of shops to make a face for himself. First he uses plain wax, but it looks creepy and inhuman so he abandons it. So he breaks into a seafood shop and rips the meat out of a bunch of crab and lobster and uses it to make his face skin. It looks really good, but he’s allergic to shellfish, so his face swells up and it looks disgusting and awful. He abandons the “make a fake face” plan and decides to kill everyone at camp.

He goes to his own group’s secret hideout, and begins to kill everyone there gruesomely with an almost comically large knife. I see their deaths in graphic detail, though all but one have blurred together in memory. The one is a super obese guy who is splayed across the hideout’s sofa watching professional wrestling, seemingly oblivious to the murders going on about him. Ernest finally goes to kill him, slicing his gut wide open. But the obese man ignore it, and tell Ernest to go away and let him finish the wrestling match. Ernest decapitates him in a fit of annoyance and anger.
Somehow Ernest kills the girl I’m after, catching her outside of our secret hideout. The final third person scene is Ernest floating in a hotel indoor swimming pool, holding her hideout locator, screaming “They’re not here!” The camera pans straight downwards, through three layers of basement and a parking garage, finally settling on our deep underground hideout, and at that moment I realize that she has died.

I decide to turn back time to save her.

We are back in the basement of the Hawaii house cooking dinner. Ernest comes in, still alive and with a fully human face. nonetheless he is a malevolent force, and hates the girl vehemently. He jokes with us in a bullying way, and then tries to strike her with a novelty baseball bat. I grab the bat in midair and tell him to leave, and he slinks away reluctantly.

It is two days after this incident, and the entire camp is playing a game of baseball. The teams are the same as the secret hideout groups, and Ernest’s team is up to bat. My girl is pitching, and has pitched out one player. I am on first, and have tagged out a second. Ernest goes up to bat, and on the first pitch hit’s the girl’s ball right back into her forehead. She falls to her knees, and in a daze says “Tell me this was all a beautiful dream.” She dies. I wake up.

Dream #3

I am sent to a job for the moving company. It doesn’t seem that difficult– A large house, sure, but I’ve done them before. When I get to the house an older man, thick with a dignified paunch and an aura of self-righteousness, begins to give me instructions. Before too much time has passed, I have somehow been drafted into fighting other people in the house. I am there for weeks. I wake up in the morning and begin to train for fighting, and it is horrible. There is another boy there, and he is my main rival.

The boy makes vicious fun of me. He is a complete asshole, and his name is Jon. He goes to a fancy private school in the east, but treats everybody around him with a casual disrespect. He drinks constantly. We fight one day with pole arms. He hits me hard, but neither of us wins.

One day I wake up and the man tells me that it is a death match. I am in the kitchen with the other boy, and we look at each other and immediately grabs forks off the table. I expect a long, drawn out fight, but once I tackle him to the ground it is too easy. I stab him in the leg several times, in his balls, and I finally rip open his throat with repeated fork stabbings. He puts up very little resistance. When I stand up I am horrified at what I have done, and run out of the house. Everything is covered in blood.

I return to the house the next day to help finish the move, which is not done yet. The paunch man tells me that the boy I killed was his son. He was studying to be a lawyer. Paunch man tries to attack me. I run into a closet and lock the door as he and his wife pound on it, demanding to know why I killed their son. As I stand in the closet, I lash back to all the mean things that Jon has said to me. Suddenly I’m not sure if he said them to me or if I said them to him. Was I the evil one all along? I find a second door in the back of the closet and escape.

I return the next day to help finish the move. The Paunch Man comes up and tells me that Jon was engaged to a girl named Mary, and all her family is coming to see his body and to judge me for murdering him. I feel awful, and run away.

I return the next day to help finish the move. The Paunch Man tells me to go and find Jon’s clarinet. I find a huge elementary-school-style plastic case, and open it. I pull out what looks like a clarinet case. I open it and find a soprano saxophone. I think about stealing it, but decide that I wouldn’t really play, and shouldn’t fool myself. I dig deeper in the plastic case and find a clarinet, two glass pipes, and a small, intricately detailed wooden box full of weed. As I pocket the box of weed, a girl from the neighbor's house walks into the room. We leave the house and begin to flirt.

I do not return the next day.

Dream #2

It is a futuristic world, and I am a renegade female assassin. I can remember that first bit. I encounter a Vladmir, a Russian knife throwing robot that is manned by two women. I try and fight him, but it doesn’t work well. Finally I just capture one of the tenders and hold her in front of me to escape, backing out through the abandoned underground rail system. I turn her into a rabbit so we can get a long better. I have a toolbag full of the work tools from my real life job at a moving company.

From there we crawl for ages through these tiny abandoned rail systems until we finally emerge in a place that is future Scotland. There is a MAX tht runs very high up on a concrete platform, and I know that I need to take it to Ohio for some reason (in the back of my mind I am worried because I do not know where the Russian robot tender lady rabbit is, but I go on). I run into a bunch of Scotsman in battle uniform trying to hunt me, and I have to fight back. I try and make a gun with my hand and point it at them to kill them, but they say that microtech doesn’t work on the Scottish, so I have to snap their necks (this all takes place climbing the stairs to reach the raised MAX line. Once I reach the top there are all kinds of civilians around too, and I pick one direction on the high up platform (it has a sidewalk that goes the whole way) and start fighting along that willy nilly,. (Ariana is here with me for some reason.) I ill to young people who are reading books, and then have an inner monologue that chastises me because “They were just lovers, not soldiers!” After fighting through the crowds for a few minutes I reach the minister of Scotland (which is bad, because I’m trying to get to Ohio). But he says “So it’s begun,” and yells out to his soldiers. Apparently they want to go to war with Ohio. So the MAX at the station transforms into a Battle MAX, and I yell and ask to be given a gun. The minister yells “all gingers off,” and all the redheads in the crowd leave, and all the rest of us board the battle max & strap in to our seats.

I wake up.

Theopolis in the Court of the High King (Extremely Rough Version)

THEOPOLIS IN THE COURT OF THE HIGH KING

I was in for a good lay
By way of Matilda
And the forest, the thought of
Bumping about in whatnot bushes and ferns
The only thing that “does it,”
it being a long time since I’d done
anything.

But them woods did not put out
them flames, and them twenty minutes spent
fruitless searching for my lazy eyeful
garbled me, and all was not good.

I was mistaken, then,
Bamboozling my way
Keenly past said honeypots,
Your wells and thickets
Drolled up to look like
Wells and thickets.

Staying was
Unexpected. I sucked on
Zero pomegranates, planned no
magpie assimilation
Slowly or with a rapid hup-hup
and jump to it, did not conjecture
nothing.

It was whimsy what beat me
no dreams of hunting, but
horny hurt and
bored among woodland creatures
I was content to plod after
some shiftless doe
albinism struck
not particularly fast.

And when your dogs found me
Luckless facedown in the lake
I was brought here, as if my criminal hands had crinkled
Bones and crunkled rim wits to the edge. I admit, I walked
Them three miles, and I tempted that deer
a handful of seed
some slow creeping steps
and if she had come close I would have
maybe bashed this or shamed her ups
the head, pluct sinew from teeth and been a general terror
for the sake of a sad man, or anything comes up, but there was
no waiting or walking, I watch that hind split and rise, it goes by.

these days I walk through the forest and I am the absence
of anything the forest wants, I am set with jewels
in the shape of my teeth
and hands legs offset anything hair and twitchy smile
a line of hairs that surprise and disappoint
warning Noli me tangere to a universe
which learns Latin
just for this.

Harold is Made of Balloons

Harold is made of balloons
completely, while answering phones
at Best Buy, watching Eddie Murphy in
The Haunted Mansion he fills himself with static
and touches himself, feels tethered
to the pole he is tied to
and also his life, which he is told he will go home to
though at home there is a carton of ice cream
and Seinfeld, and the books did not tell him
this was life. It was :Fireman, Policeman,
Astronaut. Or going home to something
different, he is pretty sure there is a small blue
eyed boy involved, though Harold doesn’t like boys,
who try to pop him or let him go into the sky
until he disappears against the blue
or black if it’s night
though often Harold thinks that he should let himself go
against the blue (he is afraid of the black).
There is also a pretty girl who is not blond
who opens the door and offers him pasta in a glass dish,
though Harold is modern and would not mind offering her pasta
in anything, and she tells him (he is sure) that he is
Doing The Right Thing
going to Best Buy the next morning and learning
not to hate Eddie Murphy while rubbing himself
against his own hair, and he believes her because
she fills him up fresh every night
and pulls him under the covers so he doesn’t float away into the
Terrifying Black suspended above him, though sometimes he wonders
If you fall up long enough do you turn into a star?
The books told him that stars take a million plus years to reach here
and most of them died a million plus years ago
and while this sounds less foreign to Harold, who thought
he would be a star for years and years, and
dead for millions of years seems within his grasp,
he is happier under the covers
of the books that told him everything, and though he makes his own book
which is very small and filled with promises to write a big book about the
Truth and Best Buy and The Haunted Mansion, he would not
tether himself to it, he thinks
he might not tether himself to anything.

Fragment

no philosophy stills the setting sun
and though what graceful pauses come
and lengthen moments later lost
horizons swallow all celestial.

Love Poem #4

the infinite distance
between us
is the same infinite distance
between the two most distant mirrors
in two mirrors
facing eachother.