Communities can sometimes serve as illusions. For instance, writing into a wall of meaning, writing oneself into a listserv or even a Facebook page, or onto a group of people in some space however imagined, assumes that you really care about being a part of the community, when in the end, it’s not about communicating, but being, and most of the time, one exists alone, at least in the work of writing. I think if I had my choice, I’d want to forever be in an “art cloud” as my friend, the artist, T.D. once confessed being inside of. It is then that I smell D. come out of the shower and feel the smell of soap and sleep washed away and realize I am not anywhere near my family, and the job market prevents me from seeing them for many months. Out of the cloud, into my bed.

I feel this raging internal chaos, and I can’t quite identify the source, only that my dream life is on the move in multiple registers, while I try to rest. I cannot contain, nor do I understand what it means, or just how the fields shift. What I am hoping to get at is how to move beyond my own conscious awareness. Out of inadequacy, out of fear, pondering laziness, I sit at a table being questioned in the dream by another poet. T.M. asks, what’s your origin? I do not answer this question, and a few questions later, I say no comment, and I can’t quite say what I want to say in the dream. Something haunts me as I awake, but it is not the interrogation, it’s what happens in the dream, in the space of an impossible conversation that takes shape, one wall after another built by way of saying something like, my poetics emerges from this.