the girl in my dreams was sweet and a little bitter, riding bikes with me in the hall, not laughing about how much the hockey game costs and then instead just moving in close to me as we sit on the windowsill and listen to some lady i used to work for play guitar, while the whole nation wrapped up in the latest rocket launch waits to see what happens. i think we worked in food service or something. there was a fair a ways away across some fields, with a ferris wheel. there was lonely grass and some wistful lighting, oblique white parking-lot lights making millions of tiny sharp shadows behind every blade of grass. there was an extra-dream sense that something maybe bad was going to happen to the guy in the rocket. there was a half-awake image of myself holding onto a rocket as it launched, holding on until it was too late to choose an option that was anything but horrible death--let go and you plummet, hold on and you implode, or explode, or who knows but there's no air out there, my friends, you're too far from home and too close to the sun