Dreaming on my bed cross-legged
Surrounded by still images:
memories, so to speak –
thousands of them
scattered and strewn
across the sheets,
carpeting the floor
from wall to wall.
Disorderly piles of them
like mountains and valleys
rising and falling
No rhyme or reason.
Author: David M. Rubin
I'm a philosopher and writer living in New England. I enjoy musing over the complexities of human nature, imagining their possibilities, and discovering hope in the darkest of circumstances.
Her Smile
Hey Anne,
Found this poem in one of Isaac’s boxes. Do you know anything about this woman? Did she really exist? Doubtful huh? 10,000 miles? Not sure anyone would travel 5 miles to visit a loon, except for social workers. Just being real, not mean. I’ve always loved our little brother, but his issues pushed everyone away.
Our ghost, Mr. Shrink, is back again. Poor Isaac!
Be careful, the paper is dried out. Looks like something chewed on it. Wash your hands afterwards!
Lizzy
Sleepwalking
I felt “watched” whenever the moonlight streamed into my bedroom window at night, paranoid that God used the moon as his lookout – probing me from there with his powerful flashlight. I didn’t want “him” to see what I daydreamed about in my bedroom. Not that it was anything bad or abnormal for a 12 year old, but I didn’t want my parents finding out and meddling in my private stuff.
Old man in the gym
Gazing into the gym mirror, old man Isaac observes a bloated belly; a fat neck that balloons out in every direction; skin transitioning to wrinkled leather; a generous portion of randomly scattered skin tags; arms and a chest with no muscle tone; bony, stick figure like legs; and a head gone bald. Yet, Isaac persists in turning this way and that way, searching for his 25 year old in the mirror, hoping to find a vestige of his youth somewhere in the reflections. For now though, every angle in every mirror shows the accumulated wear and tear of many years of despair, with no sign of the young, physically virile man of his past.
The shrinking of Isaac
The shrink in my dream told me that a little piece of “something” is who I am. He showed me a tiny, hairlike splinter on his pinky finger, to demonstrate just how small this “something” may be. He asked me to consider that this minuscule fragment of “something” has been the real me, the only real part of me, since it formed during the earliest days of my life. And that before that time, I did not exist as an identity of any kind, but only as a formless blob of competing needs, fears, perceptions, and instincts. One day, the shrink explained, a tiny part of the blob solidified around something, such as an unfulfilled, infantile need or childish wish, and this hardened piece created a wall around itself and separated from the rest of the blob, becoming me.
Notes from David 