Dream Disease
You be the building and I’ll be the fire.
She’ll be the one on the funeral pyre.
All night and day I will dance around you
and climb you, as I try to escape these
twirling images. At the moment I no longer
want to deal with these words that drip
like blood, each one a little city etched
with a smoky memory or two of something
mildly to severely traumatic. Sometimes I
just don’t want to wake up to a face, I want
to wake up to birds chirping and being blown up
by shotguns and songs about big black rivers, a
paisley haze. Every day I grow more tired of
your tiredness, of your wavering abjection, of
the way you and your country try to suppress it all
with drugs, staving off dreams like they are disease.
Snowy Hell
Sorry, I fell into a pit of flowers
and could not climb out for a while
because the stems kept breaking
and the petals started rotting
and I got sick from the smell.
Later I woke up on a cold California
beach, dragged out by someone who cleaned
me up with bleach, dragged out by someone
who had arms enough to reach into my
jagged heart that’s space deep.
Here I am I guess, people tell me I’m pretty
but I suffer from an ugly private paralysis.
Here I am I guess. Please give me your best.
Sorry, I fell into a pit of flowers,
I started playing solitaire, got distracted
for hours. And then the stems kept breaking
and the flowers started rotting and I got sick
from the smell, and then I woke up on a beach;
someone had dragged me out of that snowy hell.
Drea Jane Kato was born in the great state of California and was raised Buddhist by a gypsy-like artist mother and a Japanese farmer who currently grows pineapples in Hawaii. She is a Capricorn, Dragon, INTJ, HSP, Atheist, singer/songwriter, abstract painter/artist, iPhone photographer who likes yoga, fasting, and the beach. She has been published in magazines such as The Blue Jew Yorker, My Favorite Bullet, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Beat, Ditch, Pomegranate, ReadThis Magazine, Otis Nebula, and Alternativereel.
