PARQUE GUINLE
Words GEORGE ABSHER
All the parks here it seems are built for cheese platers — sorry, chess players. My thoughts are getting ahead of me again, or even behind me. Whichever way it is, they’re back at Gjust, back in Venice. Back where life is still something real and regular and not this dream I keep having.
It’s not a lavish dream by any means, but so neither are most real dreams really. Luxury is a fantasy, like the opposite of a nightmare. I don’t usually have either when I sleep. I’m very sound. In fact, I don’t think I’ve had a dream once since I got here. I just fade out when the hour gets late, or if I’m out, in the early morning, and then I come to with the sunlight.
No, my dreams only nag me in my waking life, and in that wake, after working to the bone day in and day out, not at the work I need to get done, but the work that is necessary to carry on, after all that I nod off into one of those great dreams I’m accustomed to now that goes on for weeks on end. Grand, fabulous dreams they’ve been. They’re more or less the same, but always different. Strange and vivid dreams, entirely particular in their detail, in the sounds of the birds all around, and the cars in a city traffic and motorcycles with small cc’s chugging up a hill.
I’ll hear the water in the silence in between, and I’ll hear the trees when the breeze picks up. I hear shovels cutting through dirt and casting it aside, and brooms sweeping, and hammer and nail, and chainsaws it sounds like, and like something surreal, David Lynchian damned near, all the people talk and the children carry on in unintelligible tongues. I’m not meant to understand, but that is the nature of dreams. I see and I hear, but I feel nothing.
Not the insect bites or the hunger pangs, just the general things. Fear and love, restlessness and bliss, caution and carefree, and all together at the same time it seems. But I feel no breeze, I only see the leaves moving. I smell the cigarette smoke when I walk by, and never know what to make of it.
Rich dreams, but not in wealth and luxury. No fantasy. No deep despair either, no nightmare. Just the same things, but different recurring over, and a year rolls and it recurs again. I’m always a runner writing, oh run away to a foreign land. And I sit in the park and I write.
It’s not a lavish dream by any means, but so neither are most real dreams really. Luxury is a fantasy, like the opposite of a nightmare. I don’t usually have either when I sleep. I’m very sound. In fact, I don’t think I’ve had a dream once since I got here. I just fade out when the hour gets late, or if I’m out, in the early morning, and then I come to with the sunlight.
No, my dreams only nag me in my waking life, and in that wake, after working to the bone day in and day out, not at the work I need to get done, but the work that is necessary to carry on, after all that I nod off into one of those great dreams I’m accustomed to now that goes on for weeks on end. Grand, fabulous dreams they’ve been. They’re more or less the same, but always different. Strange and vivid dreams, entirely particular in their detail, in the sounds of the birds all around, and the cars in a city traffic and motorcycles with small cc’s chugging up a hill.
I’ll hear the water in the silence in between, and I’ll hear the trees when the breeze picks up. I hear shovels cutting through dirt and casting it aside, and brooms sweeping, and hammer and nail, and chainsaws it sounds like, and like something surreal, David Lynchian damned near, all the people talk and the children carry on in unintelligible tongues. I’m not meant to understand, but that is the nature of dreams. I see and I hear, but I feel nothing.
Not the insect bites or the hunger pangs, just the general things. Fear and love, restlessness and bliss, caution and carefree, and all together at the same time it seems. But I feel no breeze, I only see the leaves moving. I smell the cigarette smoke when I walk by, and never know what to make of it.
Rich dreams, but not in wealth and luxury. No fantasy. No deep despair either, no nightmare. Just the same things, but different recurring over, and a year rolls and it recurs again. I’m always a runner writing, oh run away to a foreign land. And I sit in the park and I write.