My Life as a Rorschach Kafka Quarantine Dream

The light was gray and the air was close, cold. My eyes kept going in and out, ceasing to function, coming back, and while I could talk on the phone to my mother, sitting there on the near-empty Long Island Railroad, dim for once, I couldn’t do so in a way that could be understood. As a result, she remained cheerful, oblivious to my intensifying despair of ever getting on a train going the correct way, of ever getting anywhere again, let alone being with her or anyone going forward. The two train conductors I encountered in person remained blasé as I became more disoriented, including about becoming more disoriented.

I was trying to get to the Iroquois Park stop, but I made a rookie’s error getting on a train going the wrong way at Woodside because I just didn’t think because I just couldn’t think any longer. But I was still expected to do things people who can think are expected to do, like call when I’m on the train so they know to pick me up or present questions about train routes to conductors in a semi-coherent manner. Instead of myself the trusty traveler, I was the anxious woman who is there, there dear’ed and ignored, some annoying non-silent lady who should really be traveling with a man, or at least not alone, and I felt myself devolving, legs treading water without moving

After some long minutes or hours being frozen, I got up, looking over my shoulder, over my other shoulder, and began wandering between cars, opening the first door I found. Pushing

down that faded lever erupted me into a car stuffed with rows upon rows upon rows of maskless white Long Island people, all facing me, all lit garish by the normal fluorescence, until I blinked and found myself in the fluorescence of Penn Station, where everyone was also unmasked, including me, to my additional horror.

Next blink I’m back on the gray train, masked, looking out the window at blurred gray landscape moving faster than the train, unable to orient. I sit up in the hard, old seats, designed for commerce not comfort, and again attempt to interact, to ask for help in a semi-coherent fashion from my mother on the phone, who again suggests I talk to the conductor, and then the conductor, who tells me, bored, I can get off the train at the next stop, climb an impossible number of rickety, steep metal stairs to get to the opposite platform within a minute and from there maybe find a connecting train that might link up to one bound for Iroquois Park. And here’s an updated schedule that is even less readable than the last one, letters blurring into unrecognizable symbols blurring into blur

Iroquois Park, Iroquois Park, Iroquois Park; when can I rest? I stare out the window, the relentless non-view, and think of the native Iroquois, slandered as vicious fighters, white man killers, in an early social studies text that I had the misfortune to remember in detail, though I could not identify where I was and had given up on understanding anything happening in the present at that point

Northern California

Operator

Earlier as I was driving down Griffith Park Blvd., I was dreaming of a magic carpet with an operator, someone to transport me around, a better option than driving or walking when I'm feeling more inclined for a stretcher with everything going on with everyone everywhere all the time in

America, though of course a magic carpet with or without an operator would be preferable to being carried on a stretcher by multiple people. The closest I've ever come to being carted off is after passing out and becoming unresponsive on a family road trip at age 12 or so, somewhere in Georgia, which is what happens to people from New York in Georgia, I've heard told, and/or to people on family road trips. I remember regaining consciousness to see

a man in white running at me with a wheelchair and urgent eyes, the mouth of the ER door 20 feet behind him gaping open overbright against fading daylight.

Conventions

Conventions: yet another waste of our tax dollars and yet another occasion for more of this stodgy infantile condescension from our moral inferiors, who also enjoy playing helpless along with the deluxe healthcare and stability they deny us every damn day

These conventions also function to remind women what second-class citizens we are, with the alleged professional class, anchored by the professional marrieds (money, 1950s gender roles rebranded, stories about how loving they are), throwing us under the bus every time to embrace their secret heroes, misogynist right wingers, every time to tell us men we don't even know hold more power over our own bodies than us

A Circle

An unquenchable crush in
quarantine just makes sense, these
feelings just become casualties
of these times yet continue to override
any other thought I have about
anything or anyone, a circle
I can't close

Not a Fan, 2020

Not a fan of retreads

Not a fan of careerists in government who have never
run in, let alone won, an election

Not a fan of any clique that refuses to relinquish control, even
a clique I like

Not a fan of their wealth, which makes for bad governance

Not a fan of their self-importance

Not a fan of their hierarchical mindsets, their
comfort with misspending other peoples' money, people
who work much harder than them

Not a fan of their incessant one-way
communication at me, or their misogyny

Not a fan of fandom, or being ordered to talk a certain way or
else about someone who could give a damn
about me or anybody but himself, the usual template

for our American figureheads, who are delusional enough
to declare themselves role models, to
posture as leaders toward people they are looting

New Norm

Eyes without a face, baby, that's

all of us, every

day, our new norm, don't

call me on the phone to tell me you're alone

Different Ways of Coping

A Siren's Undercurrent

Soothing Only I Can Give


He’s like dark waves

lapping at edges of my

life, dark ocean straining

to envelope me, a siren’s undercurrent,

always

there for me, should

I stumble

Re: Lynchings, 2020

White people don't want to hear about it, White people don't want to talk about it, White people insist on denying violence against Black bodies, spirits, hearts, minds, insist on utter disregard, on the refusal to investigate their deaths, or to stop causing them, White people

get angry if you persist in talking about it, White people want to la la la and cling only to the deep-seated belief that they, under any circumstances, are not supposed to feel uncomfortable by even considering a reality that is so plain and ugly, so readily apparent, let alone by copping to their status as willful, silent enablers, even as their fellow citizens are being lynched.