OK, I'm going to read a couple of pieces
from a series of fake dreams.
January 19th-- no contact this morning.
The Pope and I were going to have lunch at what he
said would be the Waldorf.
We walked there through a somewhat
sub-aqueous New York, sweating walls, women in Hawaiian shirts,
men in aprons with beads of perspiration on their cheeks,
suggestion of mold on most walls,
almost all the stone grainy gray to tan,
to smooth black, purple, carrying hints of blue, green,
silver.
Some low lintels even had seaweed.
The Pope was wearing his full outfit.
His mitre, of course, made him look quite tall.
And his robes puffed him out sideways too.
I asked him how he was handling the humidity.
He said it was all Gore-tex, gesturing toward his robes
as we strode along.
We laughed.
But I didn't hear the swishing sound Gore-tex makes.
His clothes were quiet.
We got to the Waldorf, which was a Greek place, the Wharf.
It really was something of a wharf.
We sat at a table made from a large wooden spool,
the kind for holding miles of phone wire.
The ceiling was low, decorated with fishing net
and red and green colored lights.
We looked out at some dark view that had water in it.
He ordered fried calamari, and so did I.
So now the time had come.
"What about Jesus Christ," I asked him.
"He supposed to have come down from heaven,
and I'm not interested?"
The Pope finished squeezing a wedge of lemon
onto his sandy curlicues.
He kept looking at what he was doing, as he spoke,
although in fact, he had finished doing it.
"The file cabinets were ordered a long time ago.
They thought they were very big at that time.
Nobody's allowed to look in them anyway.
Look, I'm enjoying my squid, how's yours?"
Yes, mine was pretty good too.
I noticed his English was unaccented.
How come no hint of Polish?
"I'm universal," he said.
We laughed.