Home for the weekend

Dreamt I was a character in Star Wars over the weekend--
Saw Han Solo clear as day, Luke beside me,
and we was visiting a friend
who was sick in the hospital.

Vader came up outside, and I sensed him before I saw him—
That ol’ iconic helmet backlit against the tarp of the Hospital field tent.
All of a sudden he was in the tent with us, all smooth and Terrifying, hissing death …
But just as the battle started I woke up! And there I was, 3:36 in the morning,
Staring out the screen into the blackness, Listening to the wind in the tree outside—
a tree We planted when my granddad passed away,
a tree Now big enough to provide shade to my old second-floor bedroom.

And when you battle in your dreams, Sometimes it’s hard to get back to sleep, ya know?
So I got up out of that bed and trundled around the house,
Roamed around the rooms.
Had a glass of milk.
Ran my fingers along the spines of my dad’s books.
And I found one on the “The Human Shadow,”
Which kinda jumped out at me the way books do sometimes— In that eerie sort of way.

So I sat down then and there and started reading,
And learned all about how we’re all dragging a kind of a bag around behind us,
Full of the parts of us we don’t let anybody see,
The parts of us that’ve been repressed,
The parts that somebody told us society might not like.
But how “shadow”, and that big ol’ bag, don’t have to be negative.
How they’ve got some positive juices in ‘em too—

Then tonight, trundling around the streets of Baltimore,
I smelled a smell that seemed like the 90s:
Some strange and humid mixture of stale cigarettes, laundry exhaust,
And the way the gas range smells just after you’ve lit it.

The old lady next store growing up always smelled that way,
like she took the scent of her house with her everywhere she went.

And I got to thinkin’ how life here, in Baltimore, isn’t so much different
Than life in Peru, or life outside of Philly growing up.
The smells transport me around, ensuring I’ll never really forget.
And I keep dreaming of epic battles,
Fights between good and evil—
Noble stuff that, I think, has something to do with the fact that each day
I seem to be fighting to chip the positive out of the drudgery.
How the burden of routine winds on and on wherever you go,
And it’s tempting to keep chucking bits of me into that big ol’ bag
That’s dragging along behind me.

But some part of me, some weighty, full, serious part of me—
Says no, keep dreaming.
Keep singing in the morning.
Keep laughing at the cat when you wake up.
Keep making comparisons between the way life was then,
in a dusty village in Peru,
And the way life is now, working long hours in Baltimore.

The life they live there, on the other side of the harbor,
is as different to what I know
as the life in small-town Peru was to me
when I first got to town.

And maybe life’s simple like that,
when you step out of the routine on lonely nights
and smell a smell or see a sight that trips a memory
that trips a feeling that sends you back—

Back home. Back to what it used to feel like.
Back to sometime more innocent. Back, back, back—

Yet the days take you and whisk you off,
Whirling, trying to grasp a dream.