Tonight, your story runs through my head. No that's wrong, it runs through my blood.
It trickles and rushes in tumbles of words that won’t come out of my fingers.
I can hear you laughing at me now. I’m always to overwrought. Everything is a big deal with me.
You posses me like a ghost.
Fifty thousand words couldn’t get you into corporeal form on paper. They couldn’t get you solidified in my thoughts. You are here, there, and everywhere all at once.
Sitting in the living room, feet up, and reading a book. Out in the middle of the night on the Grand Canal. Sending me photographs from places I don’t recognize.
All the time warm, alive, and running full-tilt into the future.
Where I don’t now how to follow.
Tonight, I feel broken and brittle. Like chalk crumbling in the hand as it tries to write.
I want to write a message on the memo board beside your front door.
I mean to say, “Sorry I missed you.”
But I can’t find the words. They break before they form and crumble into little bits that blow away on the breeze.
I want to say, “Why can’t I find you?”
But I hear that voice in my mind, the one that tells me the truth, tell me that no one is guaranteed to find anyone.
Then why do I remember you?
Your memory, I’m told, is an illusion of the human mind. It’s a fragment of a defect in how we are assembled.
I prefer to think it is something I was allowed to keep from the last lifetime into this one.
Another illusion, I’m told.
But tonight, I cast my spell upon the water anyway.
Hear me. Come find me.
Come find me.
Got your email. It's good to know you are still out there sled-dogging through the chaos.
Nice pic to prove you are wearing your mask. Even with only those hazel green eyes showing, I could see your smile for the crazy woman sitting at home babbling sonnets like a schoolgirl
I could say you are my universe, my world, my blood, my bone, my marrow...but adults don't waffle on like that do they? No grown man wants to read a post that's turning the internet purple. I should construct a workman like letter telling you about the kitchen faucet, the cat's health, the new tax rates, and all the things that, supposedly, rule our lives.
But, I know better still. You are not here, and I am acutely aware of what is important. I have a fine grasp on the fragile and irreplaceable. When the roof does not leak, and the pantry is full, and the night is quiet; my heart beats patiently and listens, in the still, for yours.
Saturday night. Another page in the chapbook. Paint, ink, paper, and the jazz of Oliver Nelson. ‘Midnight Blue’ from ‘More Blues And The Abstract Truth’
The sweet saxophone riff coming from the left-hand speaker and the drum and cymbals from the right make me feel like I have myself together. Tonight, I am compact and self-contained. I have my world and my preferences. Horn heavy jazz. Big band swing. Memories of stockings and heels. You, in your chesterfield coat, standing in the cold on the sidewalk outside Blues Alley inhaling a cigarette so fast I could hear the paper burn. You stood there in the cold, your face aglow from the music, the drinks, and the long night to come. Smoking like a dragon, smoke rolling from your mouth and nose and steam rising from your body through your unbuttoned coat. Radiant heat leaving wisps of steam as we both walked from the oven hot showroom to the car.