dance

He dances up to my desk with his bag on his back. A little step towards the elevator bank, a little dance back. Smiles apologetically. Says Hi. Asks what I'm doing. I say good. He says good. Working I say. On what he asks. Memorizing something. Oh. Same smile again. I stop typing and stare at him long enough and pleasantly enough to make him uncomfortable.
A little step. A little smile. Maybe a cough. I was trying not to notice.
I can't think in this place you know, he says. Something about it. I can't think here. Must be the walls, I say. What about the walls, he says. They're blank I say. No, he says. I think it's just that when I'm here I'm focusing on work. I say maybe it's because when you're here you're not moving. Little step. Silence except for my chattering keys which I am priding myself in not abandoning for one second, not a moment of silence for this tapping machine. I'm even beginning to be able to carry on a conversation while not looking down at my hands and keeping the clacking at a reasonably feverish pace. I am a real secretary.
During lunch, now he says. During lunch I talked to this lady. It was wierd. Oh? I say. Yeah, he says. We both saw the same thing or something. She was a business lady, you kow well dressed or whatever and she's sitting there on this bench eating sushi. This guy comes up to her and he says Ooh is that sushi? and she says yes and the guy says-I think he was homeless or something-Let me try one of them and she gives it to him! I guess she felt intimidated or something. Women feel like that sometimes. Then she started telling me about her family or like her job or something. One of these people who needs to talk, you know? You know those kinds of people-
I clacked.
I don't know maybe she was going to cry he said. But she must have felt like intimidated or scared by that guy and that's why she gave him the sushi. I asked her why she did it and she just shrugged and said I don't know. It was the middle of the day. I mean, I understand being intimidated if it was late at night and the guy came up to her and asked for some of her sushi or if she was alone but it was the middle of the day, there were people around.
I kept typing. His dance had ceased as his confidence grew. The story. Of his lunch. The woman and her intimidation.
He said, I mean, I 'd get on a bus late at night if there was only one other guy and wouldn't think anything of it. Especially not in the middle of the day. I said nothing.
Then he said But some women...I never feel threatened if I’m the only one on the bus. But women…some women.
I said Some men, too. Can feel threatened.
He said I don’t know, most men aren't going to feel threatened-
I interrupted him and said-Do you know most men?
Little dance resumed.
I pressed further with You speak to most men...most men in this world on a regular basis? You know them?
He laughed and said Yes, that he did.
I said I bet you do.
The elevator opened maybe at that moment or maybe moments before or perhaps he ran to the button and frantically pushed...while dancing and getting away
from that
which threatened him.


One of these people who needs to talk, you know? You know those kind sof people.

Strangers.

Counting the rocks on the way home
pills in the cabinet expiring
strangers
strangers
strage
sorry, strange.
Mistakes
made in counting.

My aunt has asked me to ask around and find a man she once watched play Hamlet. She says he is the only man she thinks she could ever be with for the rest of her life. She wants me to ask around among the "theatre scene". He played Hamlet at some community playhouse in Alabama, had long black hair and muscles, passionate about acting. So it would be great if I could ask around about him, being as I'm involved with theatre and this is New York which is where people go who are passionate.

She said she's prepared to know whatever I might find out. I'm going to tell her I bumped into him at a supermarket...the grocery store...the subway...a bodega. I will tell her I met him late one night in a crowded club. We were parallel to one another, climbing our way up to the bar but seperated by three degrees of people. We reached it at the same time. I found a stylish and likely expensive coat beneath the bar on a hook and tucked it under my arm, thinking of finding the owner, starting off as her hero, becoming her friend. I opened my mouth to order, regardless of the bartender's lack of attention. Someone else's voice spoke my words. "Seven and seven." Seven and seven. Our eyes met. He paid for mine. I spilled his when his hand found my thigh and my balance eluded me.

It's a cruel world, auntie. The way he did Hamlet for me that next morning, the whiteness of his teeth, the cruel madness in his eyes. He didn't have to captivate. He didn't have to constantly eclipse himself with more moremore and all of that. I suppose I didn't have to find him. But I did. And you were right. It was glorious. I end.

I end here...with this imaginary shit. I left a library book at the bar I worked at last night. I hope it will still be there later. I hope I didn't scrawl anything derogatory about my employer on the bookmark. Shit. I think the bookmark was my paycheck. Shit. I should call. I should write. I should make time for mourning while still allowing myself to function within the confines and schedules and rational practice of a normal stupid damn ordinary day. I need to have one of those.

Normal stupid damn ordinary need four more syllables that's six and now at thirteen day. Oh day you began with a stranger who touches me like a wife. You begin with letters and fragmented feelings of alternately mad and upon a point of breaking...something to considering what to do with that bicycle I bought for twenty dollars with the cut lock from the man on the street. It's yellow and stolen. The man was brown and lying. I have chained it to my own bike in the basement and am trapped by the illegality of my own yellow possesion. Comes upon me like a courtmarshaled billing statement. "I must be dealt with. I am yellow and in the basement." Maybe I should donate it to children. A stolen bicycle? Donate? To children? Shit.

What else, what else. Elsinore. I am to play the part of a woman who dies a terrible and frightening death in a film. The character is not based on me, because the man who wrote it did not know of me until last week when I auditioned for him, two of his associates and a video camera. However, to curb my own recent tendencies towards destruction, I will throw myself headlong into this woman and die her death to purge myself of any risk of myself actually dying. I cannot die if the character dies. Because films are not real, see? They are fiction. And one who dies in fiction cannot die in fact. Cannot die, in fact.

Goodnight, goodbye, good else what else is good? Time to wash the sheets. I've lived in them too long and others as well. They deserve to be blank. Strangers. They deserve to be burned but I need them.

Carpet and Carrie

When people walk on carpet
no sound
no sense of progress
suburbs and office
make numb
make nice
streets make crazy
hard and hot


There was a girl named Carrie in college. she had thin lips and crunchy blonde hair and no one seemed to notice.

(those things)

Oh, they noticed everything else. She was a Christian. She did not drink. She held offices in Student government and in her sorority and had a cute boyfriend who wore shoulder pads without irony, was on the dance team which meant she wore blue spandex. This is the problem with women in offices. At any given point any of the stenciled women in dark blue suits carrying papers might have worn spandex. Blue spandex shorts with MT stenciled across the ass in white and little pompoms to cover it with shimmy until just the right moment. The problem with the "girl next door" is really that any "girl next door" can never be taken seriously if at some point in her life she ever wore blue spandex.

My spandex was orange. Hooters. The girls who weren't good enough for blue. Across from an auto-diesel college. I drank GrandMarnier at a shit trap tourist bar in Kissimmee and drove forty five minutes home in orange spandex and a sorority sweatshirt plastered. I turned up the radio. I kept between the lines as best I could. I turned up the AC. My hair was a rat trap of dye jobs. My purse was a spilled chess set of product. I cannot believe sometimes that I did not fall harder. Life was so real. Traffic so frustrating. Malls so soothing.

I ran up credit cards as soon as I could get them. Any they world sent me. I bought things. I kept in touch with my roots in the sense that I hid them. I bought packages at tanning beds and gyms. I went out to the Wing Shack and drank beer with a fat girls ID and ate fried food with a skinny girls metabolism. I cannot remember the last name of a single person I knew then.

With Carrie it's only her first. Carrie. That's all she ever needed though. Homecoming Queen. Probably grad school. President of shit. Girls who feel important by being elected to jobs no one else really wants to do. Maybe that's kind of what it's like to be an artist.

Give it the sun

Soft skeletons
wishing their bones away
at the face at the wall
of an unresponsive prison
screaming
shut out this crawling
shut out this moving dream
of night
we will never be
tell me when i come in
let out
our minds have grown ropes
oh walls
oh wrestling big
one among the other we walkspit
compete
stuck together
with no other pastime.

grass

We will never be
let out
but you know a joke
so let us hear it.
Magnified
bits of plenty
reconstituted
like
like
beef
like
sideways
like
which is on
sale
the bones
of the skeletons
laying down of course being sideways
grifting their slate
up on nothing
a sandbag
a gardener toiling free
(sarcastic)
master everlasting his ground hard his
his hard ground his everlasting master
and flowers his pricks of jubilant lust
when they bloom
but what if they never come?
when they bloom
An endless winter?
A renegade maggot?
a churlister chopping rock
graying its frays
whittling the henhouses to dust
whittling the streets with speaking

Carpenter carpenter build me a street
of bones and pricks and mismatched feet
what will this sagging grass have for its run?
Give it the sun. The sun.

We decided the clock was a woman

I dreamt of the death of my Grandmother. I dreamt of a numbered fortune I would freeze and hammer into shard if I ever got my hands on it. She had called the night before and left a message in a sweet and pleading voice. Surely this and the guilt of not immediately returning the call was what signaled the dream. Much of my clothes are wet with coffee. On some the coffee has dried leaving its fragrant stain, but others remain in a heap on the floor, mush-together with the brown stuff. I delight in imagining, as a hallucinogenic effect of the coffee smell, that they might spring up as if infected with the form of ghosts, and dance rudely about the room for my amusement, or start speaking in riddles to me from their crusted folds.

The reason for the spill is this: I am not sure. I know I came home in a state clutching several bags containing what I must have interpreted as sustenance. In the morning I observed a half bag of chips which had spilled some onto my desk (I ate the strays for comfort of my acid stomach) and a crumpled empty slab of white butcher paper I am guessing at some point contained a sandwich. On close inspection, the sandwich consisted in part of hardened and cold but formerly melted yellow cheese. There was a bit stuck to the paper as a bit of brains might stick to the thick bleached California freeway, turned and broken by some mid-morning seismic shift.

Now I am wearing the sweater which smells of coffee. If there was a detergent being sold in these days with the smell of coffee and if it were reasonably non-allergenic I would buy it. If I needed to. As it is I need it not. I have few things I wear and most of them were on my floor at the time the coffee cup which had been left inside of a paper bag slit itself open for fear of abandonment, was stepped on and crushed open by the drunk and greedy plodding of my own ridiculous and already sleeping feet (for the cup was crumpled or mangled or physically disturbed in some savage way when I found it the next day in a pool of its own thin brown blood.) or…or…perhaps both of these things happened, like the dog trudging to its death in the speeding street whose marrow is already webbed with cancer.

A sweet smell, not unlike chaos, or fear when it withers away with the cold. Shriveling madness, inching away along the back like an itch, unnecessary. Circumstances were tolerable, the itching of madness unnecessary. But nonetheless she drinks with the light out, and when one wanders upon her nonetheless she stays speaking to a stranger she finds ridiculous, staring at a mirrored woman she finds insane. Insane. Insame. I speak. Yes, I speak. Of myself. But sometimes, when the thought becomes alive with possibility, when the thought becomes, as it were, real, I becomes she and she becomes a stranger, capable of flight and centered in fiction and capable of explainable things. For most of the things I keep encountering are unexplainable, the triangular globe hanging from the corner joints like a wad of snot, photographing my face as I stare into it and dream of a knife that might remove it seamlessly and without detection. Would I then attempt something illegal? Would I then hide within the walls or behind them or at the very least out of view to ambush a sick woman waiting for a ride? No giant guttural eye to record my progress to her face. Nothing but a busted alien bug and an empty corridor and stairs for stumbling surprise. But nothing even more so. No progress. No busting evacuated ambush. Reason? No knife.

You I can explain. You are a mystery in terms of facts, but if I were to be asked to place things upon a plate which you would eat you would clean it to prove me right. It is in need that one loves. With personalized plates and seasons and for Gods sake rooms, one wants-more this, more sunshine, less derivative angular shit you call inspired for the walls, less action and more leisure, the leisure of time to talk not for the sake of noise but for the sake of introductions, for the sake of discovery and ultimately love. I have leisure. I have no time to talk. My Grandmother calls me. Her name deserves capital letters, but I cannot call her back. Instead I fear her death like a guilty conspirer. I fear her health like a sentence. I fear my own thoughts when I sleep because it is then that I cannot shape them, that they warp and curl into dreams I can only watch and stutter and shake through until they end or bleed into another. Elbows frozen or liquid, face a hideous mess of emotions, like a retarded but earnest adult. Earnest? Oh the muscles of a swimmer.

I have recently engaged the muscles of sex on a regular basis. From this I have learned the regularity of perhaps the other way of thinking-that dreams are the one and only time my thoughts are controlled, limited to only what is already inside, even perhaps impervious to some insistent whispering in my ear when I have been lucky or cursed enough to get it. In a dream I cannot suddenly be subject to new and destructive information. In other words, in dreams I cannot get fucked. Mute to any possibility I cannot myself conceive and often when I sleep these days I am drunk, so those possibilities are by poison limited. I know this from trying to enter interesting and challenging conversation while intoxicated or full of lust or food. I flounder and drown in their-anyone’s-all of their-voices. I cannot get the rhythm of reply right and when I attempt it, some faster reacting individual across from me has already taken that beat and made far better use of it that I could. I intended to say the cloud looked like a piano. You had it play sixteen discordant and escalating notes. I could never have played them for you. Better you reached it first.

This dream? My intentions? The smell of this room which is pleasant but masking something sinister I am sure...the question I am getting to is this: Is this sinister thing myself, or some presence I am trying, through immersion in vice and doubting of self or immersion in self and the doubting if vice indeed does exist, destroy? Can dreams inspire guilt if guilt exists in the same place as dreams? Surely one does not exist more than the other. But then, no one ever says "Oh, it's just my vivid guilt..." the way one says the same about a turbulent and colorful dream. I dream, and I'm not sure if I entirely believe it, but I've believed in nothing for some time, so nothing continues to surprise me.

As a child I dreamt of killing. Not myself cast as killer, but dreams of killing that terrified me and caused me to wake in sweat. Sweat I rarely knew as a child, being small and stick-like, stuck together at the joints by very little, and almost more like floating bones in their bored and jangling rest, kicking off the front of the couch, kicking my sister under the table. Days and years and minutes spent indoors watching the hours pass into night in which I dreamt of monsters, of fatal situations, of myself falling into something and of animals, vicious leaping muscle aching with spit to end me with a snap and a tear and a rabid sequence of instinctual movements. Now, more and more I dream of logical death-the death that takes slowly and slowly wakes each day with a little less surprise. The kind you hear about over the phone from miles away. The study of an abstract concept which leads to oblivion of the senses. That nothing is nothing is nothing thing. You keep speaking and speaking and say so little. The eventual death in that way. The cloud has been overdescribed. The fence overpainted so it peels and cannot stick to itself, flays in the wind like an exploded stick of dynamite. So here I am overpainted, with nothing to say. Sending up prayers? Keeping it in your head? Either is maddening.

Consider seeing a man screaming at the sky. Consider seeing a man screaming at himself.

A woman gives birth to an hourglass, blood in swirls upon the curved surface. She pants and requests her child. The doctor wrings his hands over how to classify the sex of it or not at all, maybe better to lie and profess the infants death, whether to jump from something or to wipe his hands and make a speech? An associate of his, weaving a joke of his own nerves, assigns it the female sex obviously referring to the shape a grown woman takes at one or some point in her life if she is lucky. The doctor, being a man of logic and humor being a form of magic, does not find this funny. A serious colleage enters the room. As it does between these two, debate ensues.

A man is not a clock.

A clock is not a man.

We argue on the same side.

No, just because another does not take the part that a man is a clock or a clock is a man or a clock is a man and a man is a clock both, doesn't mean...

The associate speaks.

We decided the clock was a woman.

They all fall down.

Esses and Enns

April is going to be a beautiful month. I knew a girl named April once who is now I expect no I know she is married. She wore quite a lot of makeup and was very good at organization and leadership. when I decided April would be beautiful Iwas not immediately thinking of the girl I once knew, but her presence in teh chain of thought signifies something. Perhaps the aspects of her personality-the makeup, the follow through-will be things I will suddenly be gifted with as soon as April starts. I wish the month of April would go ahead and start.

I will maybe buy some sort of new hat. I will maybe feel like a thing that is alive and alove. I saw a man drop a dollar on the train today. I was eating a pound of the green melon known as honey dew. I forgot how sweet it is which is completely unbelievable as the name itches with sweetness. I ate it with a plastic fork and I stared straight ahead into nothing with my back curved and bags and bags beneath my feet and on my lap. I carry too much. I always want to need something that I already have. That to me feels convenient and like I am prepared for anything and also like I am complete in the face of the wilderness. Often I leave the most important things behind, however. Like medicine. Money. My mind. Ha.

The man dropped his dollar as he was arranging the various things on his body. He was standing right in front of me on the train platform and tying the sweater about his waist this was and then another way. I was watching him over the horizon of my honey dew because he was standing over the horizon of my honey dew. Stabbing with plastic. That strange heavenly green. The pillowcase/sheets of an iceberg. the dollar fell and immediately, without waiting for him to pick it up which I'm sure he was about to do...this man who was so carefully and rapidly adjusting his outfit was not oblivious to the loss of this money. I said, "You lost a dollar."

He bent to pick it up and put it into his picket. Pocket. He said "Lost is an overstatement."

I think he was very right and I was wrong. However, to my credit, I think my reasoning can be explained. I felt the need to speak. Because no one else really was that I noticed or maybe everyone was speaking at once but not about the principal thing: that being, the dollar which had fallen. I needed to make a noise with my mouth and also, Ithink part of me wanted that dollar.

In that sense and also in the sense of being an unnecessary voice, I was wrong. Perhaps also in teh spelling of unnecessary. I never understand the complicated rules involving s's and n's. Esses and Enns.

Esses and Enns.

cat crosses the street
our hands meet

dust and muscles

I am a witness to
two types of desperation.
One-
the desperation of backing away.
The other-
desperation of desperately wanting.

I decree them equal.
I am a split witness.

I recently found myself
listening to a short story
about a dead pet turtle.
Small and green,
it escaped its aquarium
and wandered a desert
of shag carpet
equally green
the sort of synthetic wasteland
a small green turtle gets lost in.

It was found three days later,
shriveled in the position of trying
to crawl under the door.

Tragically funny and magically sad

decreed equal

I have mistaken peace for happiness,
easily done
without a sharp sadistic sadness
to provide adequate contrast.
A wash of warmth
disintegrating palate
Happiness misses its enemy.
Oh, they write...
but the distance becomes...
(spoken with a sharp turn of the head and demure sorrow)
"...too much."

and another thing:
Religion has infinite possibilities.
Last night I promised to pray for a dead man.
I have not yet succeeded, however,
I believe I am intimidated by the endless infinite.
Perhaps I am speaking to nothing.
No.
I know better.

Perhaps I am speaking to everything at once.
The podium of the gallows.

I am a witness to the fact that
others share my aversion.
In fact, most
prefer
when possibilities are not
infinite.

Examples:
Television.
Video Games.
Money.
Mazes.
Land.
War.
Law.
Hippies.
Gadgets.
Sex.
The Equal Sign.
Aquariums.
Dead Turtles.
Examples.

In fact,
if someone were to create
as God once did,
a world containing all these things,
I believe it would rapidly become
the best sort of life to have
especially if there was the sense
of being watched,
a happy desperation
and infinite peace
and all things were equal
within these bits of maze to move in.

Mattress and Boxspring store
Prices in the nines

windowfront full of
heated rack full of
complimentary hotdogs
a crimson aquarium
stuffed with piles of
dusty yellow popcorn

Sleeping and Eating

Lap

If I met George Washington
in a bar
with a strange woman
on his wooden lap
(I believe this could happen)
I believe I would have to displace her
by screaming
at the absurdity of it all

Yesterday I groped at the moon.
Yesterday I accused the sink of insanity.

I mouthed off at the mirror and fought an epic battle
amongst my own piles of clothes.

I have been piecing together borrowed quotes
to form a coat
that is both alluring
and will provide me with
a secret armor.

I believe if I saw George Washington
with a talking cantaloupe on his map
and his lap full of battles
and his throat full of emotional apologies
I might begin to question

this iron table
that endless night
my tastebuds in their ignorance

or a dance I once remember having with a boy
when I was a girl
Heaven had an equator.
Music
came memorized.

If men are made of dust
and women of blood
and dust makes wood
and blood makes a stain
then men are marked by women
like a tree on the hill of a massacre.

The gills of floorboards
breathing in the dust of George Washington
soaking up the blood
of the woman I laughed off his lap.

The steeple in all its prettiness
the tree tired and big and black
the sharp edges of buildings
the unexpected hot
headlights hit eyes
causing temporary blindness
all of it
causing temporary blindness

what causes these babies
everywhere
to elope with music?
temporary blindness

the sleeve of large black water
eating up my sun
dreams eating up my sleep
temporary blindness

White Noise

The brown cement buildings on my block stuck to their lots like sponges. Blotched from the rain which has made me quiet. In need of something acerbic. Cut open my eyes to a throat-filled fear.

“You know, darling, 27 is the deciding year. Whatcha gonna do with your life?” She asks the question like she’s allowed to smile about it. She drinks like she could any night. She talks like everything that means something was never meant to hurt you. Like she can lie the sound of night with her eyes. This is the sound of night. These are my eyes.

Her laugh. A month is nothing. Slipping your fingers into angels tired of slipping. Her walk to the bathroom. I consider the consequences of following, all these consequences a flat, imagined nothing under my heavy, stupid, arrogant fear. She chose her escape in a convenient moment. She doesn’t have to go. She’s playing with me.

Her laugh as she disappears, taking with her the last happy bite left in a minutes-old joke. How dare I fear anything? The closed door behind her.

The sidewalk fitted with small pools of murder, yellow radioactive soup gleaming up from a construction crack marks the spot some sub-dominant creature tried to rise to the surface but backed away to cower and plan, leaving its failure behind. A yellow, radioactive pain. Rust colored dusklit factory spew might have been a murder. Or at the very least, something organic. Something human. An industrial lust.

In this moment I am holding a beer in my hand and trying to find a new point of conversation. (She’s left us dry and uninterested in one another and with nothing in common besides a mutual fascination with the little glimpses of teeth and spark and unconcerned availability her flirtation offers.) I think at some point I must have placed the beer on the table next to me or on the head of the man I was left with or let it slip from my own to his own hand. Perhaps a hinge in the back of his neck opened and I dropped the can in like one does a trash can. Perhaps he was equipped with recycling or is actually a magical, bottomless well. He wrote for a trade publication. Had black hair. Wore tennis shoes. I wouldn’t have noticed. He may owe me a wish.

The room is full of mazes on my way to the frame of light at the end of the hallway. The maze of women forgetting themselves while remembering to always remember their faces. The maze of women interested in my intent. The clusters of men that secretly hate each other but love to appear interesting by association. A civilized murmur among the coffee shop art on the walls and the coffee shop talk of the party. Why would she dream of coming here alone unless she meant something by it? Why would she mean something by it? A month had been plenty of time for her to accumulate new things. The skirt, for one. The laugh tinted white and strong with violence. Little differences. Little men I knew nothing about. Bigger than me perhaps. Able to break my fingers or my face, but little men I knew nothing about.

I spent a month expecting her face at every door I sat behind. I’ve never wanted a stalker so badly. There was a “Fuck Off” when we parted. Now she stares at nothing on the wall with her eyes wide and deliberately intelligent. Now she’s composed and pretty, possibly two or three pounds thinner and too pristine to have ever uttered such a gross phrase.

Her position: second in line, behind some thin, jacketed fiend with a face that reads “I’m gonna piss all over the walls.” My position: I decide to banish all further small talk. I’m a wolf…maybe even a lone one. I need no one and nothing except to tear that huge white laugh from her throat with my big bad ass teeth.

I offer up a fond memory we shared.

“Member when you told me to fuck off?”

She’s struck.

“Brian?”

“Kate. Do you remember when you told me to fuck off?”

"Ok. Yes.”

“Well, now I’ve decided to fuck on.”

As soon as I say it I know I’ve made a ridiculous sound. Like a burping songbird. She stares at me. I’m momentarily grateful that I detect no suppression of laughter. Maybe a smirk? Nothing. Somehow worse.

She delivers a cheap shot in the form of a slow once-over and says “Have we really run out of things to discuss, dear? Is there only passion left?”

I want there to be a waver in her voice, but ultimately settle for the slight readjustment she makes to her purse on her arm, causing her to misstep for just a second. This glitch could possibly be construed as a stumble and I’d like to blame overwhelming emotion, but I’m afraid a single barrel scotch with two ice cubes and a splash of soda deserves the credit.

“Brian, do you remember how whenever I was annoyed at you, no matter how pissed I would get, that I still couldn’t keep a smile off my face. Just a little one? Like a smirk?”

She offers a smirk to demonstrate. It’s a fake one.

“Yeah.”

“Well, I got over that.”

I privately wonder what sort of contrived shit she’s been reading. There is malice in my thoughts, a mean-spirited sarcasm burning up my loneliness like ethanol. Crude oil. Dirty burn.

Door opens. Exit thin jacket in a dense cloud of piss-smell. The bastard succeeded. Light floods the hall. First time I notice the walls are purple. What sort of idiot, I wonder…I wonder how she got away so quickly, the door shut again.

I tap on the door with sadness and victory set firmly in my eyes. No. Too judicial. Perhaps a bit of understanding in my posture? Have no idea now to act. Who to be as soon as the sound of my hand on the door and the voice from inside makes waves through my ear and is real…really real, I lose sense…of how to be. Alone at the end of the hallway. The dead end of confrontation. I think I will be whatever she wants. Give way to aggression and hope she finds it sexy. Give way to sobbing and hope she forgets it’s real.

Too many new things she’s given herself. The new clothes. The new laugh. The new stories about things she’s done I haven’t heard about already. Her private injustices we haven’t interpreted together yet. I am even…perhaps a story she has told someone else and perhaps been advised on. I tap with my hand again, feeling louder, feeling my face fall with the weight of confusion and worry.

I prop it up by the time the door opens. Only a crack. Three fingers at the bottom of the door. A smell sick and wet. I wedge part of my face that has an eye into the opening. In seven months I never saw her vomit. Her high white laugh hacked into cackles. She defiantly vomits without me. Stories I haven’t heard yet. Laughing days I’ve missed. The joke never stopped. It just grew savage.

She turns up her eyes like the insides of wires. Her face is a wild chattering tree of exposed nerves waving and reaching for me. Thin, screaming fingers of red. When you imagine yourself having no expression at all on your face, it must appear distressed to others. Like when you boil a lobster or a fish. Its eyes blank? No. Boiled. Seeing her on the floor by the toilet in this new way…I have no thought in my head for a moment. I must look boiled. She tries to shut the door again with the same three fingers, grown weak from the loss of blood to the drinking greed of her face.

I examine the mush of piles and broken bits of the street. I imagine places things could live. The garbage cans surely fit castles for rats and roaches and all sorts of microorganisms we fear and most often forget about and occasionally fear forgetting. Attracting oxygen and the ability (with it) to become airborne. Garbage bags rising like bloated balloons from their grey, diseased underpinnings. The brightly colored oozes everywhere. The fear of always noticing. I never noticed when we walked together. I noticed a crack in her hand. I noticed when it healed. I thoroughly examined each eye and places I’d left untouched and the common unrequited moments of sleep we spent just sleeping. The brightly colored oozes everywhere. The mysteries of nature bled dry.

I want to be one of those young, Puerto Rican guys in a respectable, shiny car in the middle of summer and spend the first half of the day being cooked breakfast by a bright, cinched dress with short brown legs that is my mother. And the second half of the day sweating under the rough black guts of my car, tuning and sweetening the sounds it makes. A tuning fork. A wrench. Expensive wax and beaded water and the third half of the day smoking weed and cruising a zigzagged grid of streets with music as loud as the sun and friends popping and shouting like harmonic solar flares in the backseat. I want everything in my life to be washed.

I want the sky to be white like her laugh.

She is silent in the way a wilted, finished thing is silent. A clipped and bitten flower. A bloodless mouse. I push against the weight of her hip at the door. I get in and take off my shirt. She is a very small thing up against a very flat and high and unforgiving wall and needs to be lifted. It takes exactly as much strength as I knew I would need and I use exactly the muscles I expected to use. I breathe in my own comfortable, expected strain. I sit her on the closed toilet like a porcelain doll with a cloth body. Only her head is chipped. Her heaviest part. It sags to demonstrate its weight. I take off her shirt. Her stomach instantly stiffens for display.

I take off my pants and her skirt and each one of her difficultly thick leather boots and each one of her thin, pink socks like a second and softer layer of skin that her small feet somehow need in order to be feet. I let her think what I know she’s thinking. I let her not stop me. The hot and cold metal knobs are these two silver aliens alone on this terrible expanse of white marble planet plunging and rising beneath them. They stand so straight together. I wrench them both and the bathtub fills with hot and cold conversation which I appreciate, considering our silence and the noise of the small talk just outside the door. The writer for trade publications. Her lying, sour mouth. The tottering, murmuring girls lined down the hall, blunt with need for relief. Having to pee. Needing to tend to things. The stress of a jostled bouquet. I could imagine their groans of impatience, but I don’t need to. The tub fills itself and all necessary sound. We face each other on our feet on the tile. I am the only one standing.

The tub brims and fills, eating our feet, our clothes, the last dry island of tile sinks and retreats in quiet, bathed silence. The frame of light flooded. The carpet outside the door forms a soggy moat against the line of protest. I lift her again. Naked, we slip into nothing. I am cold she is hot. I am hot she is cold. We flash back and forth between each other like the timed ends of an experiment on the conductive properties of water. We flash back and forth with our silent nonsense. No laughter. No sky. Naked we slip into nothing. White noise.