there were whispered confessions and whole days spent naked together in bed, the shutters thrown wide for all the neighbors to see--those belonged to a different you in another age.

it was now just a feeling, or the memory of a feeling.

the room was empty. the shutters were gone.

when you went away

when you went away
i was watching the snow
drifting up from below
the slow sway of the days

you never said a word
but your breath was so salty
the moon was at fault
see you blur like a singing bird

in another time
we were dancing on the sun
the rays had just begun
to rhyme with us in time

bleeding foreign sands
my tongue was a crutch
and now you've been touched
by a strange man's hands

Curling from the lake

There was a fog that was heady and thick, streaming outside the windows like an hourglass. You could barely see out of the windows and what you could see looked like fragments of a half-remembered dream, something that seemed fevered, photocopied, and real but was now fading lazily and mixing with childhood memories, things that had actually been real once but were now a soft-focus jumble of missing details and unconnected cameo characters. Still there was that fog, billowing like the breath of a shaman, encasing everything in its backhanded granduer and swampy mystery.

For his part, Antonio knew exactly what to make of it. "Girl, that looks like the smoke machine when I perform 'I Will Survive'. Get me a strobe light and some three-inch heels and you'll see a show right here, honey!" The Aztec laughed in her little way and they walked away talking about pancakes and diet soda.

Just like that the fog had been made banal.

My Aim is True: Side 1, Track 1

It was a jagged kind of domesticity. The kind that sneaks up on you from behind on the balls of slithering feet, knife clutched in silver teeth. The kind that drags you kicking and screaming into a twilit world of repetitive killers and zodiac timeframes: boredom reaching through the wires for your windpipe. The kind that drops you into looping arcadian rhythms and hopelessly circadian longings to go leaping, running, dancing, rolling, diving, screaming, laughing, fleeing through the primeval forest just outside the windows in a mad, mad dash for something so fleetingly eternal it has no name.

Twenty years can drip away in a split-second if you're not careful. You close your eyes and suddenly you're an old man, slouched and slinking through a world that keeps getting younger, babies debase themselves before you, prostrate and spread-eagled like some lurid centerfold for the jaded and amoral preschool set. All your seeds wasted under the waves on the desert floor; hopes unfulfilled, dreams unremembered, playing a character in a theater production of your own life, dutifully mouthing the ash-wet lines written by another homelier sort of person in a large empty room where the echos bounce back and the sound multiplies into tone-deaf platitudes.

But at the same time, every day seems to drag forever the same, you know, with elegantly wood-paneled ransoms sweetened with a dim fluorescent hum. Time suspends itself on hooks from the cardboard ceiling, twisting slowly to mark seconds as hours and hours as a childhood lifetime. The jackals cackle from another room, waiting, waiting patiently, for the suspension hooks to finally tear flesh, waiting for the blood to hit the ground in a stream of ghastly eons.

Yes, work made you mean. The kind of mean you didn't want to be, the kind you didn't realize you were until you provoke a confrontation over something idiotic, took a heroic stand on something entirely transient, or snapped at a child, yelling with a dull-headache throbbing on your breath between clenched teeth and grayed eyes. The dull, uncurious workaday rhythms of adulthood turned you into everything you mocked as a teenager or as a child. Everything you swore you'd never be, an inattentive father, a philandering husband, a boring man.

Working was a kind of suicide, but it had none of the bang flash whiz-bam shock of a slit wrist or a toaster in the bubble bath. None of the gory celebrity of a leap from heaven, greeting the ground with a brilliant saint's egg crack. No, rather, it was bleeding to death from a thousand fleshy papercuts each a little deeper than the last. It was death by leaching, color draining, strength remaining, but not for long. It was possible to lose yourself in that static desert with its shifting sands and paperwork dunes. But that was its virtue as well.

You could watch the body sit and twist on those heroine hooks with an empty mind and closed eyes.

You could forget.

These Days

And she whispered to me with those white soap lips flecked with a subtle algae green in the upturned corners. Her voice was thick with years but lightened by confession, like dust settling on droplets of honey. Fingerpicking her words as if speaking a fragile lullaby, vibrato and strings twitched behind her in harmonized dance of papered grace: she told me of the lives she never led, the things she had wished to do, the children she had dreamed one day to have, Susana, Ella, Jackson, and Thomas, gold-haired princes all dressed in sky green camasoles, sweaters and skirts.

She told me of the dead men who once fancied her, each in their different ways and each more selfish than the last, convinced that he and he alone had the neccessary masculine sensativity to pry her open, reach deep inside and find the still-beating pearl lying so lovely amongst its flowery beds of gently folded flesh. She had not forgotten them.

She used to lay her head on pillows of silk and daydream of all the lovely ways there could be to live one day, one future day as she listened to the wheels of the clock turn in quarter-tones past midnight. She would make her home in cavernous clouds of such cascading possibilities, so very many different things to sample, taste, compare and choose.

She used to gamble and to laugh, she used to stroll in the park in warmer days to see the rare but hopeful sight of the leopards screaming their joy in the air overhead. She used to fuck and run and dance and sing as the warm rain fell so densely from the heavens; unafraid of death, unafraid of the lightening or the moisture or the angry vengeful wraith of an unnamable diety who threw all this costume horror down upon the earth in crystaline spite and who saw everyone, everyone else in the world, flee inside at the sound of his loud ejaculatory rage. Everyone but this one fearless girl with the slender hips and the ivory lips as she ran and danced and sang and fucked as if her heart were about to tear open and gush out the streaming, burning pages of a long-locked, long-lost childhood diary.

She had made no comprises because she had none to make.

But the years float by like steam up, up, up into the cold, thin air, losing meaning as they twist around the city spires ever faster and dissipate into the dim, pink sky. Fruit slowly sagged from her bones and flesh fell from the trees in harvest. The kids never came. The lovers never stayed. And the pearl remained buried, private, permanent, embedded in its red folds deep behind hard-hearted and sheltered bone.

She learned to fear the rain.