May 7, 2012“Just Like Two People” by Richard GarciaRichard Garcia

I got out of bed like a decomposing century of death. I had been in a dream in which we were together like a steel daisy and a rose made of razor wire. Then I took a shower, all the while thinking of you, and my thoughts were a robin frozen on your lawn or maybe like a snowman in a blizzard. So I drove to work which is actually next door to the bedroom. My office reminded me of a bloodsoaked hairdresser, at least that’s what I thought until I wrote a poem that hit me on the head like a book falling out of the sky. Later I rode my bike through the park that was like a hot iron I thought was unplugged. All the bare trees made me think of Vlad the Impaler, but the birds were chirping like explosions in reverse. Or was it bald trees, or bards, or tresses instead of trees? Bike—poem—thoughts of you—all in all a successful day. Time for a nap and I slept like a duck in a phone booth. Again, I dreamt of you, picking up where we had left off. You and I together just like … like shards of falling glass. Except that I was just like two people, someone named you and a person named I. Once again my brain waited for me to wake like the basket waiting beneath the guillotine. But it was too late, already I had fallen through the trapdoor of interviewing myself. I was also a panel on Keeping the Faith. I was the audience too. Sometimes bored and skeptical of my answers, sometimes amused, but cautiously so, like a lion tamer with narcolepsy.