The $42,000 Dream

by Max the Cat

"Thank God for every mountain and every stream. Thank God for every flower and each dream. Thank God for giving life to you and me. Wherever you may be, Thank God."

Well pardon me. I wasn't the one who didn't have time to bring me in to get last year's let alone this year's distemper shot. So can I be blamed if March Madness has hit me a little bit harder than usual? Excuse me. I'm not the one that disrupts our peaceful sleep by selfishly flinging me towards the sky. If he doesn't want me to sleep on his stomach all he has to do is tell me so. Geez I'll move.

Thus tonight after a little bit tension he left here in a huff, off to a basketball game. Told me before he left that if I thought it so easy I should fill this page this week. Told me for once to use some of my boundless energy for creative purposes. I don't know if he was actually serious, I'm never quite sure of that, but I figure I can at least do as well as his dutiful weekly navel gazing. I thought I'd take the opportunity to share a story from my days on the streets. It is a story that crosses my mind (in every sense of that term) sometimes when I gaze intently out my window.

It's a story that was actually shared by a creature I stumbled upon. This hideous poet had a pension for self pity. But he once told me a dark tale that makes me shiver as I ponder its permanence. The story was in the days when the judges ruled, when there was a famine in the land, about a man who went to live for a while in the country. On his last day at work he was approached by a colleague who asked if he was OK. She said he had been walking around with a pained expression on his face.

"I'm just a little weary," he confessed.

He is an arid invisible man. Claude rains his sorrow down upon his shirt like blood. He has a historical hysteria and the opposite- a hysterical history. He desires to be an imaginary broad shouldered man but is nothing but far too sensitive. With an urgent visceral need, he is far gone enough to have come to a foregone conclusion. He knows that what he must turn and run from will be wherever he ends up. He's seen this movie before. It's a vision thing. The resolution is fuzzy so he adjusts the rabbit's ears.

Words are just thoughts that people sometimes say.

His poem sat unused, the burden of a soul abused. A cherubic conversion of caustic majesty, the apex of lace at the fringe of something divine, seductively secular, succulently sublime lay discarded, never to be seen again. More forlorn than provocative, more evocative than sullen it was a passionate representation of jaded joy, morose melancholy, a harrowing exercise, a hollowing exorcise. A transcendent soliloquy, a defiled visceral sly smile the effort was wasted. A repressive eclectic sapphire myth, a discouraged repressive perspective thirst, resigned to an intuitive distress. Archived for all those familiar with such self destruction.

This grief too will pass.

The beauty that once inspired has been defiled by the need(?) to disconnect his mind from his heart. He believed she'd be there. Her indifference was numbing. Anger wells and he actually at times has come so far that he wishes he never had met her. His anger has reached a level as deep as his love was and it wasn't like the two could ever co-exist in the first place. When things were crumbling he worked harder. And not exactly for selfish reasons.

He could give but he cannot receive.

It was hard to stay angry but not so hard to remain mad. There were little things she said and did that made him go back home, glance wearily and steely into the mirror, and wonder where to turn.

He knew in earlier times for the redemption and transfer of property to become final, one party took off his sandal and gave it to the other. This was the method of legalizing transactions.