Woke up from a dream about something that seemed
really important after having fallen asleep, apparently,
in front of a fire in the backyard, only to suddenly wake,
lost somewhere inside a prairie blizzard of fortune cookie
fortunes, only to suddenly awake sitting in a rowboat
that must have followed the moon out to sea while I was
sleeping again, apparently, only to bolt awake once again
to a phone ringing and a strange voice on the other end
asking me what my fortune said, whereupon I woke
(finally, for real, this time, I think) in front of a pile of
glowing embers with the urgent, frantic need to write
down whatever it was that had come to me at the ground-
zero / epicenter / inner onion eye of all these layers of
dreams but all I could recover was something about a
butterfly perched on a clenched fist, closed around a
handful of fortune cookie fortunes. Hell, I don’t know,
maybe it was a silver dollar or an earring. Maybe it was
nothing.
