"The world runs through us"

I could start with dreams, since I rarely have them. I hadn't dreamed on consecutive nights in more than a decade. "Sleeps in Fits" could be my Indian name. But there I was dreaming--super powers one night, confused in a distorted neighborhood the next. Deep sleep, Freud be damned.

I could start with inspiration, reading Jack Kerouac's poems, or Junot Diaz, Carl Sandburg or Matthew Dickman. Writers who read the world and themselves and swirl the two together on the page. Writers who look beyond language to what the words point at.

I could start with reading Ada Limon's "Shark in the Rivers," sitting along the Anacostia River while a Coast Guard Dolphin helicopter circle-hovers the river, three, four times; the river a debris-littered still in the days after Hurricane Sandy.

The pilot and I look at the river, neither of us wants to jump in.

The helicopter's WHUP is louder than the river, but not as loud as Sandy.

Ada Limon says, "This is the way / the world runs through us..."

and I wonder if she means with dreams, inspiration, words, poetry, helicopters and hurricanes.

The death of mud puddles

"Filled with kids in rainboots / who know the pleasure of mud and kings." The universe is like that when you have early eyes. Matthew Dickman knows it. He remembers. But he also knows it becomes more than that. It's not that the mud disappears, it's that we look past it and the rainboots don't fit anymore and we don't buy new ones.

And we learn too much. Biology is the death of carefree mud puddles. Brackish water isn't meant to be seen through. But that doesn't stop us.

Mortgage payments are the death of mud puddles. Who has the time? And how does rainboot stomping help us move on up like George Jefferson? There is no utility in even the perfect puddle stomp.

Gangsta rap is the death of mud puddles. Once you've come "Straight Outta Compton," once you're packing a 9mm in your sweatpants at a nightclub, you can't be seen stomping in a puddle, just stomping on some chump mother fucker.

Business suits and fancy shoes are the death of mud puddles. Who could afford the dry cleaning bill? Who could show up to work covered in mud?

We can't unsee what we've seen. We drive through mud puddles on our way to somewhere else. Somewhere consequential. Somewhere important, etched into our schedule.

Maybe rainboots are unforgetting like elephants or Shel Silverstein's Giving Tree. Maybe they are biding their time, amassing an army. Waiting to take back the world, give us back our mud puddles. Maybe the next time you see a wall of rainboots, you'll remember.