June pretty much sucked all the way through. On the first I got a speeding ticket in the last 5 miles of my sixty mile commute. The following Monday I discovered that my tire was flat at 6:00 am as I headed to work; I spent most of my day dealing with that. That Friday I was unexpectedly and very rudely dismissed from my job. I battled depression and an intestinal infection with mixed results throughout the month. By the end of June I was ready to find a new career path, but I realized I had almost no transferable skills of any value. I felt hopeless and in need of some inspiration. It was cloudy almost every day as well. All in all one of the worst months of my life, and hopefully for a long time to come.

June Poem:

To Do List

Desire toward fulfillment

and purple dye

Drop all pretense

Make obsessions that work

Dump Run

June Dreams:

6/17 

A charismatic and athletic white male friend, with bright winning smile, is in a relationship with a short  middle-aged latina, with long black hair and still shapely body. She runs with him and can’t keep up, though she tries hard. She breathes hard and her face is flushed as she pumps her arms and her small legs move awkwardly because she wears platform shoes and tight pants. She falls behind but he doesn’t slow down.

“You should take it easy on her; she’s 55 you know,” I told him.

He looks back at her and smiles a smile of  love and acceptance as she struggles to catch up.

6/30

A little girl in a white nightgown appears as I approach. She wakes up in mid-sentence talking about her 2 kittens in as if she has a PhD in Kittenology, specific to the cuteness of her kittens.

The house across the street looks abandoned and looms mysteriously. Its blank suburbanness telling about some dark secret inside. It is a house that I lived across the street from when I was 9 years old. The family left suddenly leaving all kinds of strange paper piled and scattered about inside.

That same year a dog from down the street killed our cat as my brother, sister and I watched. That dogs owner was attacked by a cat and developed cat-scratch fever and died– some bizarre cycle of cosmic retribution or karmic ripple. What had we done to enter into to its flow? Maybe the scientific torture we wreaked on the ant colonies in our yard the previous summer.