freedom and
Lying in a mud of blankets rank with the stench of musk and forgotten dreams I peer out the window sill where between the shades is the one streetlight for three blocks that hasn’t gone out yet.
When I pass by them they seem to go out like they’re waiting for me and making my steps seem more dramatic, like an opera that a girl I knew once spoke of.
She said to see one before I die, put it on a list in a tiny notebook and slip into my back pocket and take it with me to the rivers and the mountains and the buildings that I inhabit.
She made like I was an eagle across the sky and she the hunter who is all out of rotten slug and evil things to yell.
I stepped out of a recently dark bathroom and found all the people I think I love in a different world that didn’t know me.
I leapt from the car and squeezed over ancient fences past doors and panes of glass beyond which dozens of the people I pass every day slept.
When I made it to the other streets, the maybe sides and cautious roads there they were.
They had found me from the dimension next and were there for me and told me I was their friend and so we drove away ignoring all the problems we caused.
I remembered them in a dark, smelly haze the next morning when I woke to find the person I thought was lemon yellow to be gone and eating away at some other thing.
Every word I speak and step I trip over is another reason I should be dead by now but I disagree there.
This point of contention is one for the men paid to do it in their sweaty business suits and heavy briefcases to yell and scream and yell and scream and yell and scream through the pews arranged for a marriage.
Arraigned for a rape.
A rape of this town that I look out upon from this window wondering what life would be like if I were just three inches shorter and had a funnier haircut.
The men in the business suits all stare at the one in the orange jumpsuit and ask him if he remembers what he did.
He just says he’s a nihilist and doesn’t care really.
I agree and jump out from behind my couch with a golf club and leap across lava over pillows to turn up the volume and find the name of this lone bandido.
The time is short and hot breathed like a day where her older sister came in and wanted to know what we had done but took it back right after.
We went to the park then and asked each other why we were.
The newscast is over and I sigh like I could have gotten something from it.
Taken bananas and piled them high up in tall hills and hiked over them and rolled down my windows to breathe in the gaseous fumes and toxic waste fluctuations of the metal antelope just so that when I escape from here I’ll have something to compare it to.
When she shows me what I’ve written in her own form I die inside because I know that I could have done it but then I couldn’t have because I am not her.
I would want to be her but then I couldn’t be here.
So we sit and wait for the other to tap away neon signs and rolled up wires and toss them across the space between our buildings and whistle when the other isn’t looking.
When they turn around we both laugh and decide to go back to whatever we were doing.
In that moment I find myself wondering things I shouldn’t.
Like a baby at the cookie jar who doesn’t know what it is or what it does but wants it because he can’t have it.
So I pile little books up from my back pocket and climb atop it like I’ve never made an ascent before.
Like I’ve climbed Everest.
When I taste the sugar and heady chocolate I’ll decide then if what I’ve asked for is what I wanted all along.
Then there goes the chance.
He gave up.
She gave up.
I gave them up.
So I could give up.
But all that’s left is him and he and he is what he needs to be to become a new kind of person that can reach back across these split canyons we call lives and try again.
He put a black mark there but tried harder and I don’t know if I can trust him now.
He has never trusted me.
And we cooked apart a new turkey and chicken and bird of the sky to throw stones at and bury deep in the world and ache when we can’t find it the next day.
I will watch the beautiful people that scamper around my pedestal that is shaking and laced with bombs on timers and ask where they are going.
If they answer I know I’ve done something wrong.
So I’ll just check my tiny little notebook and when I get close enough count the freckles on her nose.
