A Phetchaburi Island of the Mind

dedicated with gratitude and admiration
to my friend Theresa Wright

I dreamt I was in a popular reality show:
!!!PIANO!!!
in which Mozart and Beethoven are reduced to pretentious mechanics,
had a long-standing affair with the charming and intelligent wife
of the authoritarian and effeminate head judge
(the former being African-American) ;

I left and shamefully told all
in a very popular and angry blog:
went back and lived with my parents
in our solar-powered mansion
in a raw country neighborhood
north of Klamath Falls, Oregon
(which strangely enough exists outside of dreams)
and wrote a fictionalized autobiographical novel:
the concept of which was
that I would start living various sorts of lives
(really wanting to settle into one)
but from my youth was periodically
blown away to this or that distant land
(once narrowly missing an electric line)
by a dreadful stormy wind

This dream manuscript
ended with my arrival on
"a Phetchaburi Island of the Mind,"
not the actual Thai place
but an exaggerated version
where the people are even kinder
and California style palm trees grew along the tropical coast
(which is in reality unpleasantly balmy.)
the women, girls, and children
(as the men were off farming rice,
fishing for lobsters, diving for pearls,
weaving silk, or I know not what)
rejoiced when they learned
that the blonde stranger spoke Thai fluently.
There wasn't a car, computer,
factory, or polling booth in sight:
I was a lost modern sheep
returned to the fold of civilization.
But like all my flights of fancy,
it was art and not reality,
and couldn't continue indefinitely:
for once, randomly and inexplicably,
it actually sold millions

My life underwent a brief renaissance:
I started a coffeehouse and tavern
in Ashland called THE MERMAID
(not named after one
in which the lofty Shakespeare
never frequently caroused with intellectuals like
Ben Johnson and Christopher Marlowe,)
starred in a self-composed movie
called "The Tragedy of John Lennon,"
finally learned to fish
and did so with many old friends
such as Sutton Norris and Mike Cooper,
"adopted" numerous third-world children
and exchanged post-cards with some,
also compiled a scholarly garden of a library
adorned with artistically pleasant book-ends

But, too soon,
the pom-pom wielding devil
found work for my increasingly idle hands:
I met, "courted" and married
a sweet but incompatibly bourgeiouise and shallow
voluptuous bombshell blonde.
This lady
(who not so inexplicably had a hold on me)
contrived a publicity-oriented tour
of Western Europe
with a couple of whom the female part
was wealthy and famous
for the art of designing lacy men's underwear
(when my spirit would rather
have unseen wandered Greece or the Philipines)

At this point,
I composed a Rolling Stone article entitled:
"Scattered Recollections: still rebellious,
why I like Eminem and Marilyn Manson,
and miss poverty"
It was at this point
(in the dawn hours)
that my alarm went off...
I being in one of my sporadic periods
of austere artistic discipline

I stepped out onto my apartment balcony,
taking in the Chinese restaurant where I eat too often alone,
"the movies and the factories,"
the miles of insipid, uniform housing complexes,
and briefly considered the leap...
but only momentarily.

Instead I resolved,
(believing in neither Steppenwolf-like negativity,
Chinese or hippie astrology, nor destiny)
simply to live differently