from The Box Man, and Other Dreams






The Box Man uses his outhouse for hanging jelly-filled condoms in fishnets and calls it an “installation.” I’ve been sheltering-in-place here to avoid his friends, who are all racist homophobes. It’s my détournement of Eva Hesse, he says. But now there’s nowhere to shit, I tell him. Form over function, he replies with a laugh and points to an Amazon carton just outside the door where a copy of Kobe Abe’s novel lies tattered, and I suspect he uses its pages to wipe his ass. This is my monument of sadness for wanting him, coz the Box Man doesn’t eat fake meat. I feel empty like a slogan for more spacious trailers—the uselessness of poetry, I think—when I tuck my head into his chest and weep with no sense of meaning or intention, just the bland elements of conscience, childhood dreams of a shameless life. 








John Cage is giving a dharma talk at the Stud Bar where I go to practice zazen. Do you think there’s too much or too little suffering in the world?, someone asks him from the dance floor. I think there’s just the right amount, Cage responds with typical insouciance. It’s something I’ve heard him say before, and it agitates me, like when Jody asked, What does a hawk care about the war?, as if Dōgen’s “crushed eyeball” were a point of view from which carnage doesn’t matter. Upon leaving the club, I mention Plan Dalet and am immediately arrested for espousing alternative facts. Then it’s off to the re-education camp for “processing” where hundreds of others crowd the high crags, all wearing day-glo tunics & flowing gowns, perched like the ibex I once saw in Waddi Qelt en route to Jericho. Imagining my place among them, I watch in horror as the cliff gives way to the muddy sea below.








She wakes with branches & leaves growing from her head instead of hair. My skin’s a beguiling breeze, all strawberry soda, a fizzy-veil. Rachel agrees but warns me not to be seduced. The toxic effects are no different than ice-wind blowing thru a gas-powered carburetor, she says. The obvious analogy is planetary menace. Close Encounters plays on Bruce’s TV when I arrive for dinner. It’s all about pattern recognition of the unknown, he says, but that’s not enough to rescue the film from its sentimentality, I reply, invasion being a fantasy-structure, not an event. There’s a 4-millimeter piece of my tongue on the doorsill floating in a vial of fluid following the morning’s biospy. “Scam Likely” flickers where’d I’d expected “Results Forthcoming.”








Proud of my Cadillac’s fins, I slip into the lot without paying the fee and remove a long alligator-skin box from the leather seat. The parking attendant chases me down for cash with a crop. Before it died, I say, this alligator was my emo-support and I’m sending his remains to my kid coz she needs his help more than me. Just pay the fuck up!, he yells. Ok, ok, I say, but I gotta go to the P.O. first. Once there, I’m greeted by another attendant who instructs me how to relieve my psychic burden, which the alligator-skin box clearly represents. She whispers something in my ear and I head to the cornfield to perform her prescribed vows. I climb into the box, cast the spell, recite the prayer, before rushing back to the P.O. where the same attendant fills my alligator with all the cash from her drawer. How would you like me to address this, sir?, she asks politely.








Waking in Ein Ghedi next to Yousef and Jibreel following their release from Megiddo, I’m disabused of my “education” about the so-called “flight” of Arabs from Haifa in ’48. Confused, and without my compass, I walk across the desert, all the way to Romania to force Ceaușescu’s hand and make him restore the electricity in Kolozsvár, where I once traveled by train from Budapest back in ’86 with a group of young Hungarian activists transporting contraband—non-perishable foods, birth-control and medicines—for beleaguered Hungarian communities during a period of “Romanianization” across Transylvania. Poor poor American Jewish boy, Olga says, her eyes drilling into me as we traverse the Carpathians and buy-off the border cops with cartons of Kent Golds. My stand-off with Caesar is taped before a live audience where I’m booed off stage and led to a cell. The sign above my head reads: Now Serving Grass-Fed Charcuterie & Raisinettes. 








I’m in the record store, caressing Belinda Carlisle’s Greatest Hits, disappointed not to find any of her B-sides. The vinyl is ivory and shaped like an egg. There’s a years-old mayonnaise encrusted in the grooves. The old victrola moves by way of a rusty bike-chain. A review of Alice Coltrane’s 1971 performance of “Africa” at Carnegie Hall comes on the radio, so I go looking for that. A poster of Jessica Lange sporting monstrous eagle wings with a title “La Triomphe 2004” hangs beside another for “Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus.” Is that the name of a band?, I ask the guy holding a set of Krenek quartets, which works like a charm to arouse me, and he puts his fingers in my mouth. Then, over the radio, a passage I’d long ago memorized: What sentence have I dreamed here is not caught up in catastrophe, the very air of life for us all? 








Deep in our convo about the structure of revolutionary speech, Chomsky insists there’s no place for “tone” in the making of meaning. Tone is irrelevant, he insists, and I can’t believe he’s defending this proposition with such ferocity, as I worry his theorizing will siphon energy away from the movement. That’s when I’m shot by a hooded guy with a gun who looks like the lumberjack in Takashi Miike’s new film. Before the slug even leaves the chamber, I see the bullet’s path mapped cartoon-like in dotted lines that zig-zag across the air before it grazes my right ear. I wake with gauze taped to the cartilage, feeling some relief for the care, but everyone I pass on the way to work has the same dressing, as if we’d all just woken to find ourselves inside the same apocalyptic dream. Freaked-out by the menace that I myself have become, I hide under some newspapers in a metro station where I mistake “Gaza” in the headline: “Gauze on Us All.”