DREAM
   Some dreams hold within them too much honesty to dismiss as unreal but then perhaps we find ourselves in a space so void of potential that even our nightmare holds more hope then does truth.   

  I am not so certain it was not a dream.    I was lost in a new town, broke, hungry, out of gas for my truck, I was running down streets unfamiliar. Past vacant church parking lots and strip mall pawn shops, across all night tittie bars with blinking neon cocktail glasses.  Through barren streets crisscrossed by police cruisers and street sweepers, past old homeless men and young working girls, drug dealers, their junkies.   All night long I run and circle trying to stay warm, trying to find that place, up each street and down the next; I know it is around here somewhere.   It is cold and drizzling but I am sweating.  Then I see it, both the edge of the sun and the alley walk way lined by a few crazy colored kids and a graying rastafari, a few misplaced and obviously displaced; my like and kind.     As I approach I hear off in the distance a crashing banging roar; then it stops.   I turn and look down the rain streaked street; there it is again, only louder, the same sequence of crushing sounds.   I am frozen, my fight or flight instinct too afraid to respond.   Again only closer still; run.        Run!        My feet are frozen. Closer still, crash bang crush, the machinations of my undoing getting too close. My eyes are frozen shut. Afraid, my breath is stuck on the outside too terrified to breathe back in, not even for a scream. CRASH! BANG! CRUSH! I jerk awake to find a thick layer of frost glimmering on the inside of my truck windshield.   Outside the door a large city garbage truck and its attending collectors are emptying a green steel dumpster: crash bang crush.        I start the engine, turn the heater on high, and then crawl back into my sleeping bag; waiting for the frost of another night in lifes great adventure to evaporate.

M. Paul