Monday, November 9, 2009

In the nighttime, I still need you.

Whereabouts in the morning, I find myself transforming into the absent protagonist of a tired-novel, written only for myself, a semi-private-cyberspace, a personal journal, for all. I am leather bound, and drying out. I smell like must and have been translated, twice. My hair becomes the ancient words written in calligraphy. You are the calligrapher. I am the interpreter.
I wanted to tell someone how I am the skillet and you are the stove-top I crawl across.
Once upon a city, there was no recipe, we were in a taxi, hot like pavement.
The End.

Eighty years past a clinical psychologist, past his red-velvet couch
reads beautiful books, walks to the market
without a walker for reddish-golden apples. No skin. He carries a beautiful basket.
Mid-autumn, near frost, we wake up.
I, mid-poultice-wrapping, hot wrinkling legs.
I look up.
He said, he said,
“Sugarplum, we're all missing someone.”
We drank minty, Mediterranean tea.
I fed my insatiable-thirsty.
He remembers Beowulf and Antigone.

This is an elegy. We look back on the poets of transition, we look back and mourn their loss.

Once, there was an epilogue at the end of a story, where hills full of gold are full of horses that will never be tended, of baked-bread that will go stale. The treasure was cursed, the cider poisoned, the last servant wept until he fell asleep. It was written by hand on parchment, homed in a forgotten Grecian-library, set aflame.

We talked and talked about literature, we spoke and spoke about Freud. As I helped him, in his gray, into his robe, he told me his young-beautiful wife was traveling on business in Singapore.

We grow old, we grow old.
You are the toes. The End.