THAT DAY

My friend Beryl has a Christmas party. People talk of Carlos Castaneda's books--how seeing your hands in a dream can trigger lucidity, so you can take control of your dreams. Yeah? For what purpose? Amusement? To suppress unpleasant truths even while asleep?

THAT NIGHT

Boom! Boom! The great green hands drum down on the moonlit road. Left! A buslike fist pounds a lane, then a truck slams right. Craters. I seem eerily calm within doom-radius. Caught between. The reason: this King Kong is me. Passive, I ride in Gargantua's placid mind. Together we stride up the road. We follow orders. There's my green whalesize foot. Freeway snakes up through hills to dark-forested pass. Ahead, see San

Francisco. Foray's goal! Our job's to smash that seething anthill flat. To scour all that. I have a monster sense of smell. So subtle that though my very nostril's a cathedral I can (in this cool sea air) scent a single mortal bloodied under tons of rubble. Fee, Fie, Fo, Fum! Not a fairytale, but I'm a fine foe-hunter. And at my Titan-scale

the whole city's just a few strides wide. I demolish downtown, worry loose the silver waist-high towers--lay each on mirrorside and tread flat. Next I crunch the hill-tracts, like mashing cubic snails infesting veggies. Wrestle down the smugly grinning bridges.

All along, we're twinly aware. Dimly scent fear from all who flee Godzilla me--and raft-ride, drift the lazy bayous of his quite idle thought. For to the Giant this city-smash is naught, no more than my stomp-flat of cardboard, out the door Monday morns. Mundane. Apocalypse as chore.

NOTES NEXT MORNING

• See my hands in a dream: Castaneda claims looking at your hands in a dream can trigger lucidity. Well, I see my hands; nothing much but my hands!
• Power without responsibility or empathy: Castaneda's books teach one to seek power; but my dreams warn Americans abuse power.
• Mindless destruction: it's the dark solstice. The old year's dead. Clear the ground for the new!
• GREEN hands: Yow! I'm the Jolly Green Giant! The logo of an American food conglomerate. So Giant Me isn't individual but corporate power misused. Serenely flattening cities with no doubt, no guilt. Who cares what some hippies think? Adam Smith approves.

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