Dreampad Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Jeff Latosik

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Latosik, Jeff, author

  Dreampad / Jeff Latosik.

  Poems.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-0-7710-7311-3 (softcover).—ISBN 978-0-7710-7312-0 (EPUB)

  I. Title.

  PS8623.A788D74 2018    C811′.6    C2017-904778-7

                       C2017-904779-5

  Published simultaneously in the United States of America by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada, a Penguin Random House Company

  Library of Congress Control Number is available upon request

  ISBN 9780771073113

  Ebook ISBN 9780771073120

  Cover design: Rachel Cooper

  Text design: Sean Tai and Rachel Cooper

  Cover art: © Shutterstock, texture © Dreamstime.com

  McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v5.2

  a

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Disclaimer

  1.

  Dreampad

  Permanent Indefinite

  Holes

  There Is a Delivery Specialist

  The Internet

  Komatsu Floodlight

  Cats

  Trans-Neptunian

  Red Giant

  The Home Checklist

  Sky Pool

  A Mile from the Bay of Biscay on Tour with Oneohtrix Point Never

  The Eastern Massasaugas

  2.

  Troubleshoot

  Centaur

  Clearance Sales Are Adulthood

  Swimmer

  Spacetime

  Silverado

  The 3D Tour

  The Fortune You Seek Is in Another Cookie

  Life in the PhotoStream

  And Missing Stephanie Stewart

  The Bright Note

  School

  And I Looked Up into the Blue and Green of Nobody’s Fields

  Letter to Kyle Bobby Dunn

  3.

  I’ve Been Baron Munchausen

  Growth

  Cubewano

  The Natural

  Pop Rocks

  Clear Giant

  The Replay Review

  Hidden Pockets in Parkas

  The Good

  The Connectome

  The Surface Fuss

  On Finding a Discarded Blind Cord Weight on the Street

  The Adjunct

  Osgood-Schlatter

  Akasha

  Pack

  4.

  Phone Booth Man

  I Don’t Want to Kill It, I Just Want It to Live

  On the General Being of Lostness

  Dream of Dee

  Dryzmala’s Wagon

  Dear Listener

  Platypus

  Guitarist

  The Joeys at Kangaroo Creek Farm

  Only an Avenue

  Oath of an Unaffiliated Boy Scout

  The Great Illusion

  Two Cells Made All of This

  The Fly

  Dreampad

  Notes on the Poems

  Acknowledgements

  This title contains long lines of poetry. The line of characters below indicates approximately the longest line in the text:

  and not as in peaches. Things go so fast sometimes they can't be caught.

  To most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the printed page, you may choose to decrease the size of the text on your viewer and/or change the orientation of your screen until the above line of characters fits on a single line. This may not be possible on all e-reading devices. Viewing this title at a higher than optimal text size or on a screen too small to accommodate the longest lines in the text will alter the reading experience and may cause single lines of some poems to display as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent.

  1.

  DREAMPAD

  It’s this calendar I’ve dislodged and am playing

  like a simple music grid controller.

  It’s the past, plus all I’ve sleep-talked

  and confused with what took place

  and it starts out with a pulse of light click-tracking

  across time and space. I gather up some days

  and make a living beat to layer over. Then the grid

  populates as memory, which has reverb

  and you best believe it has attack. Myself, age eight,

  coming back from a vacation that my mother

  and stepfather had themselves dreamed up

  heading in the same direction for the last time

  and I’ve got a salamander hidden in my hand.

  I want to make a commune for the part-pond things

  but when I look again it’s just a smear of red

  like I’ve wrenched down a nebula.

  My stepfather looking out onto the highway

  must have felt the same thing when he understood

  my mother would be leaving—some general lack

  over which the world comes tumbling again.

  Hence, a trick I like to do. I make all that isn’t

  come to in a half-life of being dreamed and as I do the days

  patch through in a way that’s hard to damp and fade.

  Strange, though, my remixing’s not my stepfather getting clean,

  or my mother finally getting to live beside the Atlantic.

  I feel it in my hand sometimes, like a rubber band

  has tightened in my wrist, but I play better than I once did

  the older that I do. I missed something that made my life.

  PERMANENT INDEFINITE

  Mike, who lives in Paris now, tells me his work

  has given him this designation,

  PI for short. As if to bring up

  some of the fine print that underwrites

  even a synonym for always.

  Our table in Nonna’s Coffee doesn’t have to be a table.

  A salt shaker can show me where his workplace is

  in relation to his apartment packet by Tuileries

  and where the shooters came and tripped

  the wire that let down a terrible nothing like a balloon drop.

  It can also be how I tell him I’m still close by

  to that St. George campus belfry where we did our masters,

  where the art gallery’s going now

  and where I walk my part-lab part-something—

  we’re not sure because the kit broke in the mail.

  I want to show him where they’re putting

  the boutique cubes set like aquariums on single

  storeys so a passerby’s seeing fills

  the empty half of someone’s life

  so I put a finger down and say, Here.

  It’s always more common than I think—

  intending one thing but with some possibles

  floating there, scattered disc of all the essences

  a meaning isn’t but still needs.

  I know some years will begin to rearrange us

  as if they’re explaining
something difficult to each other.

  Mike’s a father now, too. No getting around

  the knack or need for clarity to drop

  down on its chopping block,

  so I put a finger down again and say, No, here.

  HOLES

  A playground fight some years ago

  years that haven’t passed so much as they’ve stepped aside

  and I came out the other end

  with a hole in my trapezius.

  Not like someone put it there, more like a space

  was pushed aside and it appeared.

  I learned to hide it. Walked with a hunch.

  Whoever saw it did this little dance

  of walking backwards and then defecting.

  The doctor wouldn’t remove it

  because you can’t subtract what isn’t the case.

  Fill it in and it remains.

  Someone with a heap of Tag Heuer on his wrist

  sits in his office and reaches deep

  into the Cayman Islands. Meanwhile,

  on the coastlines of Miami, Porsches sit

  flooded to their dashboards. A hole is what your mind

  falls into when a thing’s hard to explain.

  Sometimes I think of that rube Wile E.

  falling through a bridge because the Road Runner

  set one of those portable holes down on it.

  How he threw it there exactly, none of us Wile E.s know.

  I think all I’ve learned is that a hole’s

  not really there. That’s how it grows.

  THERE IS A DELIVERY SPECIALIST

  We were standing on the outside of what was coming.

  Trouble is, so was what was coming.

  Conveniences gushed in until they were unintelligible.

  As if we’d tried to avoid drowning by flailing

  into deeper water. It used to be you could go a generation

  and still know where your music was kept.

  Now, my music seems to spy on me

  and hide every time I turn around.

  Car makers wanted to win each of us

  by leaving nobody’s wants unmet.

  TV makers desired a papaya you could pick

  right from the screen. Pen makers wanted

  a pen you could twist so many times

  you couldn’t then find your way out of it.

  One twist and this kind of heaven opens.

  Some call it heaven. I call it a waiting room made of spares.

  Still, the salesman’s sometimes right:

  it’s nice to have your lights dim for thirty seconds

  to give you a head start walking in the dark.

  As if you needed it. Please, when it all goes out,

  as in the trees, the sky, the house,

  please

  THE INTERNET

  I first heard about it in a Burger King.

  Its aims seemed as elusive as the stock ticker

  or why some people stayed in marriages.

  The future was flying cars, phone screens, and MiniDiscs.

  I bussed tables with a cloth that mucked the laminate sheen

  and, just that spring, an annular eclipse ringed the sky

  like we were suddenly looking down a cabled conduit.

  Then, as if an indigenous strain moving beyond a range map,

  people started getting it, birdsong calling up from basements,

  the pink noise, hiss, and crackle of a connection made.

  And somebody already had some pictures: the body,

  pixelated, bare, with the feeling you were overseeing it,

  moving along the conveyer belt of banner ads.

  Weeks disappeared as if dragged into a bin.

  Somewhere, fibres tethered us to a warehouse or a factory,

  but for then the feed seemed as ephemeral as a thought.

  The search bar a mail slot you could lift

  just enough to see inside somebody else’s space.

  It wasn’t a place, but you could go there.

  At night, blinds down, but windows open, flags of light

  were quietly raised from main floors up into our rooms.

  KOMATSU FLOODLIGHT

  This floodlight is capable of illuminating large areas, even in the dark.

  —Product label

  Even in complete pitch-dark, otherwise known as me attempting

  “Helpless”

  on ukulele made worse if others are there to hear it.

  Even in regular darkness, which I confusingly think of as medium light.

  Even in performance-enhancing dark, otherwise known as a Black

  Russian.

  Even in that early evening dark we all must, eventually, sit down in.

  Even in starlit dark, which makes, as Maxwell said, any person you’re

  standing near somebody you love.

  Even the dark of the matter I picture passing through me so weakly it

  could be my own half-educated imagining.

  Even in city dark when what’s passing now or whenever for God

  turns a tilt wand and everything five feet above you, up to a distance

  called the world, is illuminated.

  Even the metaphorical dark I was in when I defended the group Ice

  Cream for Christians.

  Even the dark when the deeper and more difficult day remains; after

  hours go slack and faces and paper stop raining in offices.

  Even in the daydark! As that Riesling you held up in mid-afternoon in

  Chautauqua, New York, and said, Look, a reverse lamp.

  Even in that sort of sociopathic, literal dark. Tiny reverse lamps for all.

  CATS

  That night I received a text from someone

  I didn’t know looking for Melinda and then—

  I’d had the phone for four years at that point—

  asking about her left breast’s nipple

  and whether or not it was tender still.

  Tender. Such a word for a missive lobbed,

  buzzer-beater faithful, into the black,

  the way I imagine sending money out to a bookie

  or a hothouse banking on a novel to cover their losses

  and then my phone lit up with Gil’s final message,

  Are you still here? My thumb went still above

  an autofill of No; a position can pixelate, too.

  I imagined a doctor on the other end

  in front of a chart or perhaps a concerned

  but lascivious friend who’d gone off the grid

  when, through a window, I felt the first true breeze of the season.

  I noticed, then, no whiff of the abattoir

  remembered it had closed down in September

  all because of porcine diarrhea and condo developers,

  two things that wouldn’t have otherwise

  explained each other, but in this case they did.

  So, a brick-quiet building was what it was now

  other than the cats, unknown numbers living in colonies

  and eating the cat food some other unknown left.

  And would they relocate or be freeze-dried in bins

  or did they make do just finding food in a puddle?

  You’d walk by and see cats shift in the branches

  as if lynchpins in the leaves had come loose,

  and some calico energy would quicken the day.

  I’d gotten stuck here and couldn’t uncramp,

  so I closed the window and returned to the room

  which was darker now, but it was that kind of darkness

  that helps you see colour and, briefly, detail.

  I laid down and listened as I often did, to the vents

  as they exhaled endlessly. My phone was jettisoned

  but still my thumb hovered over air, I think it was, air.

  TRANS-NEPTUNIAN

  Have you ever heard somebody read

  their own poem on a podcast?

&n
bsp; Every now and then it seems

  they switch a word or phrase

  to another that’s not better,

  but equal in all the ways you’d want to look.

  So “If” becomes “I also like”

  and “To deal with sensational loss”

  becomes “When I get very high or low”

  and so on—*

  These subtle shifts of emphasis

  almost seem to say the written one’s

  got somewhere that it has to be

  and might not stay. But the read one

  collapses back against centripetal force

  and the poem goes on as a kind of quiet storm

  bringing something into view:

  greens you didn’t think you knew

  and blues that are no longer blue

  as soon as you can point to them.

  This remainder then: that it’s as if

  all this unravelling was as natural as saying, too.

  And stopping there on a word, the read poem,

  almost—and I should say enjoyably—

  seems to skipper off to its own end.

  Or maybe it just swerves when it was said,