I dream and Louise is not there either

I dream of a house, once again. I dream of the neighbouring house that is most similar. They share a wall, these houses. They are intimate with each other, these houses. Sometimes I don’t know whether I am in my house or my neighbour’s house. He looks like Ginsberg or Alan Watts. I surface swimming in a churning sea with a strange curving dividing black hulk. I swim around to where I can haul myself up just before I drown. I hang on to the edge I can finally reach with one arm, and fish flail about in the sea frothing around me for soaked black fur. My dog is here somewhere if he is not dead. As my hand finds and grasps his heavy wetness, my other hand is grasped and heaved upwards by the neighbour, kneeling on the rim of the black hulk. The camera pulls back and I see this tableau of dripping creatures, hand-joined. In my house it turns into his house and he has company and I find them ill-mannered when it turns back to my house again and they have sampled jars of baby food – opened them and left them all over the kitchen – on bench tops and tabletops – the opened jars collect, with one spoonful removed. I find these depredations, these leavings of spoilt wilful child-adults disturbing. These are my jars of baby food but I have never seen them before. Old-fashioned glass jars with silver metal lids, the kind that pop up in a way that is meant to satisfy one and generally does. More delightful is the trifled whimsical concoction in each jar. Three elements that shine and gleam and wobble and sing of balance. Baby doll skin colours and fake cherries, the colours of Japanese artificial food plates arranged in restaurant windows instead of menus. Food that is made of the colours of food that is not food but could be your food if it was real and now is. How dare they waste such achievements. In my house. I disappear them and reach for a teaspoon.