A Book of Dreams

It’s there on the nightstand
always on the nightstand
and she consults it
the minute she awakes,
and finds out what
her passing dreams
mean.
And they're all there,
the dreams of falling
dreams of dying,
dreams of children dying,
dreams of rats,
dreams of snakes
dreams of being chased
and all dreams mean
different versions
of incoming fortune
or incoming gloom
and sometimes they mean
a lack of sex
and she’s glad she can understand
the sleeping moments of her life
because
the rest of it,
just can’t be
explained.

The Wife of a Loser

You see, she says,
with pale and bare and crossed legs,
it’s because I married a loser,
a loser you are, and I,
I deserve better than this
she says and she reaches
for a cigarette from the coffee table,
the coffee table covering the dusty rug,
the dusty rug and a sea of trash.
You see, she says, girls marry up,
they marry up.
My mother,
she married a loser,
so this is why,
this is why this won’t work.
I married down, way down,
you’re a loser, a loser and that’s
okay, that’s okay for someone else,
but not for me. And she inhales and
exhales blue smoke and
there are bits of tobacco stuck in her teeth
and the lipstick on the white filter of her
narrow and mentholated cigarette makes me want to hurl
as it returns to an ashtray full of butts and lipstick
stains.
It makes me want to hurl as the smoke drifts
past her long and blonde and molded hair,
hair that falls on her barely open bathrobe, as if
she’s trying to show me something I’ll never have,
something I’ll never have again,
but I had it,
I’d had it,
and off the hook,
I leave.