I lost my favorite corduroy pants. How does one lose pants? They are big, and it’s not like I keep an untidy home. It’s also not like I leave the house with pants on and return with no pants, except in dreams. I lost this very same pair of pants in a recent dream, in fact. Actually, they were stolen by a plasma physicist from The Big Bang Theory. I woke comforted by the thought that the pants were safely folded once and hung on the appropriate hanger in my closet, loosely filed between my capris and my denim.

People in the poetry world are pressuring me to use the terminal comma. I’ve started using it haphazardly and am now living between two worlds.

I have resorted to wearing leggings today. Brown velour leggings. Someone should break into my home and arrest me for this fashion infraction. It’s not like I have a lot of things here with which to cover my legs. If I lose the leggings, I’ll have to wrap myself in tin foil. Then I might as well just put myself in the oven and get it over with. I could feed a lot of hungry people.

I have a woven dress that I am wearing over the leggings. The blasted thing is pilling. I hate pills on fabric. They speak to abandonment and chaos in ways I find unsettling.

When I talk to people these days, I become giddy and inarticulate. Others’ sarcasm is a strong wind my mind braces for, and it’s taking a toll on my ability to focus, reason and communicate. This is a complaint about my mind, not others’ sarcasm. I once watched a movie about a father, his daughter, and their horse. They lived in Nebraska or some such ugly country. There was little dialogue in this film. Just the three characters and the fourth, unseen character, which was a strong wind. It was relentless. It made walking from the house to the barn like the walk of Sisyphus. I once read that wind can drive a person mad. I don’t doubt it.

Last night, I giggled for a while in bed then woke up hours later with my legs twitching wildly. I’d had a dream about sharing my home with an uncaged hamster. My days consisted of picking up turds. Here a turd there a turd, everywhere a turd, turd. My home had four stories, all connected with steep ramps instead of stairs. Going down was fun, it was all sliding and WHEEEEEEEEE. Going up, I had to wear cleats or else I would slide back down, again a Sisyphus type of situation. It didn’t help that I sometimes polished the ramps with Mop & Glo. I don’t know who I am in dreams, certainly not someone with common sense, but at least I keep a clean house.

I blame the twitching on all the junk food I ate. Now I am punishing my legs with brown corduroy tights. I hope it teaches them a lesson.

People in the poetry world are pressuring me to use the terminal comma. I’ve started using it haphazardly and am now living between two worlds: world in which readers are intelligent enough to recognize simple lists without the crutch of punctuation and world in which readers must have simple lists spelled out in no uncertain terms lest interpretational disaster ensue. I feel like a Flying Wallenda, perched like a bird on the wire between two high rises.