Helen, the elite name in Grandmothers...

one more...because I've been having problems dreaming, for what seems like a real long time....

The Boy Who Closed All The Libraries: Evicted From His Own Mind

I used to dream so much that the libraries began to seem small and dull to me.
Eventually others noticed too.
And in a surprise turn, even the Government agreed
deeming them "blights",
"soiled band-aids of misinformation"
and "spotty calluses of the mind."
It pained some to see those old libraries close.
So many great books recycled into abrasive napkins and corrugated fiberboard.
So many jobs lost.

So I imagined those old librarians back together again,
clustered inside my mind,
trying to make order of things,
fussing through the disarray of my thoughts
and griping openly about being rehired to work for less pay in a smaller space,
but staying late just the same until each ridiculous notion,
and every last pornographic thought
was properly sealed, stamped, and shelved.

Before catching their buses home
they'd huddle right at the carport edge of my ear canal
and smoke together,
staying just safe of the rain, at least for a little while.

I was eleven riding on the school bus home one day
when Helen, the head librarian, got sick and died.
I heard the other librarians say she had cancer.
Heart cancer.
Someone had loved her ungracefully leaving her heart open and susceptible,
and the heart cancer had slipped in and more or less stopped her life.

After hearing that news, and watching as a deep malaise infected the remaining librarians
to the point of insolvency and absenteeism,
my dreams began dropping out of my mind like pianos from hotel windows,
instead of unraveling the way they used to,
like loose toilet paper rolls artfully flung down a long, winding set of stairs.

A handful of counselors over the years have said that Helen's death was not my fault,
but they could never successfully refute my claim that since her lover was a construct of my mind,
he was therefore, in the end, my responsibility.
And how was I supposed to live with that?
A loveless killer strolling freely between the checkpoints of my mind?

Grieve openly and forgive yourself along with three valium
was the most common response.
Sometimes they'd write these sage words on the prescription form,
like the fortune in a fortune cookie,
cracked open and instantly redeemable for prizes.
Prizes much greater than mint ice cream or steamed dumplings.

Prizes for the mind that guaranteed sleep,
but nothing ever potent enough to set these new, modern libraries ablaze.
Nothing like my dreams.