Walking to go nowhere, sitting just to sit: Mark Maxey's speaker starts out in aimless motion, and "Dirt Dreams" is the story of how he works his way toward a reason to move. The opening anecdote seems a small thing. A friend says that, despite being "STR8," his poetry and style make people think he's gay. The speaker answers that being gay is "not a bad thing... just a lonely thing." Whatever he means by that, the word "lonely" is the poem's real subject. By the next stanza he is the one on the outside, watching a DVD of Porto Rican poetry, admiring the "honesty spoken," and shutting down when it's his turn to speak.
His image for that shutdown is the most striking in the poem: "I close up like a virgin in a pew in a Baptist church." It's a comic simile, a little irreverent, and it captures a kind of shy rigidity, a body folding in on itself. The next line develops the idea. He is "always outside looking in" while holding "the key," which makes him his own doorman, "denying me entry into my own space." The capitalized "WHY?" that follows is the poem's rawest moment. It has no polish and no answer, only a question left standing on the page.
From there the poem moves from social awkwardness to something larger. "Silencing the dream is familiar to this country boy," he says, and the phrase "high rise, high hopes / pie in the sky dreams" is built on echoing sounds and worn-out idioms, so that the hopes sound slightly hollow even as he names them. He calls them "a loop of illusions with no substance," a fairytale "w/no morals or plot." The self-criticism is blunt.
Then dirt arrives, and it carries the poem's central idea. At first it is the enemy: "digging in a barren land will yield no fruit / unless you are into dirt." But the speaker asks, "what is dirt?" and answers himself: "the remains of those who struggled before us / wrestling with the same thoughts/ideas we spew out nightly." Dirt becomes a record of earlier struggles, which means his private frustration is part of a long human line. The slash in "thoughts/ideas" shows a mind that can't settle on a single word, a habit that returns in "illusion/delusion."
The image then turns on itself. The man who began by noting how well he dresses, and how people read his style, now asks to "lay naked in the dirt... rolling with my relations / until the dirt clothes my body." Appearance no longer matters, and the earth does the dressing. "Relations" could mean family, ancestors, or everyone who has lived. The poem doesn't pin it down, but in each case he is no longer standing at the door. He is inside, and he walks "forward," finally with a direction.
The ending stays unsettled. He wonders whether, on waking, "you all" will still be there or are only "passing thoughts in my / illusion/delusion." Reality is "resting on a pin head," a precarious picture, and he says, "I don't care / for in this moment... I am alive." The ellipses throughout, in "sitting just to sit..." and "in this moment...", read like pauses for breath. The last line comes after one, as if he has stopped worrying about what is real and settled on what is happening now. The unpolished feel suits that choice. The poem is free verse with no regular rhyme or meter, lowercase starts, and slashes and abbreviations like "STR8" and "w/". Its rhythm follows speech, and judging by that conversational pacing, it seems meant to be heard as much as read.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it doesn't resolve its doubts. Many poems about self-doubt end with a triumphant breakthrough. This one ends with a shrug that is also a kind of faith: the dream may be a delusion, but the speaker is alive, and moving, and keeping company with the dead who dug before him. It makes loneliness bearable by showing that it is shared.