allies of a sort

You don't believe it, and I don't believe you. That makes us allies of a sort.

You go through motions. They become you. Walls, furniture, windows, music, people you live with go right through you. It has happended, you say, I have become their small ghost. They go through you and through you. (It is not graceful.)

In a co-ed jail, we comfort each other with the knowledge of the dolefulness of man in all endeavours but one.

Once, talking to you, I felt my body covered with ants, but nice ones. Or was it just the memory of you leaving that time, when the oranges leaves hung close about the white benches in the park, in sweater-time, in the afternoon.

Good-night my tired loves, you say. I'm off. And the plastic wraps, ashes, dirty socks on the floor bed down too. Good night to sleep right through, if you do.

The great fear is what end looms when there is nothing left to say.

I waited also in the quiet excavations while seaward your stone face closed for good. I imagined your imaginary therapist, a kind of wide blue momentum. "Maybe you'll be my new one," you said once, but I knew better.

A good-bye like the stale scent of empty cupboards. Your hands were sweating, but not into mine. Outside, someone was kicking leaves, a kid running, his mother behind. A brown station wagon rolling by. You were like birds already.

A black sack in a dream threw something white into your eyes. The headboard cracked. Had the room always been this canted?

Later, red sunset lava flowing over stone walls and cement walks, grass softening darkly, wind's last moist mouthings, a dated romance heavy in the cells, and fingers on fire from touching.

Old music and coffee, a kind of bookstore perfume. A dress folded over her sleeping figure, like a larkspur collage, warming perceptibly.

To seek understanding - same as - terrified of misunderstanding. The archetypal flood - madness, no control. (I thought this when I visited you, more out of morbid curiosity than compassion, while you were undergoing a course of ECT.)

No posse comitatus will ever find us. They are cold and isolated and could never spot the truly fugitive heart. They think the fugitive heart is a political coup.

This nutty spirit of mortality, or rather morality, humiliates them in their hibernation, mocking them with true stories of themselves. Better to go into the blizzard and find a way just by going.

Half frozen canvas flaps at our approach - smudge of black ink on white paper.