they're such poets.

i become an empty sack
flapping loose
what body was - now nothing but appetite
nothing but dust

listening to your music breaks my body..

i want your bones. i want your kiss.
i want to be awake to see all that you do.

I begin to understand that you never even glimpsed what was inside of me
even when I was so open -- as wide open as I am capable of stretching.
And it makes me sad to realize that we lose our flexibility with age
and that I can count on more of a struggle each time I attempt to
stretch wide again
in my future.

The streets were wet -- some were rivers.

He welcomed me into his home and we stood far apart as he said
"She's so good and she learned so much from you. Talk to her.
Let her in."
I collapsed my bags in his corner.

His hair was different, I noted, and his surprise at me left only that knowing silence
a low tilted chin and hints of shame.

For the trickery -- there was no wall (in fact there is no wall)
and so I rose and fumbled, too
with him
there
until the strange touch of lips to my forehead brought me again to consciousness and resignation.
Outside the rain seemed to hurt even the pavement with each shocking, heavy strike.
I felt the fear build it's predictable pocket of tears in my lungs and
strain my neck

The rest then blurs
everything but my face on his beautiful knees. (gracefully letting the woman accept)
I lay long and low with my hands gently tucked behind his legs as he waited, I think
A game I never liked, at all. I've always had a weak stomach.

The colors of the rain were inside, too, throughout-- and I saw the other rooms eventually.
They loomed tall and empty with strange patch rugs of different colors -- one had yellow walls
and neither had windows.

I went out
below
to the stricken, drowning street
where I was quickly swallowed by it's ghostly dancing performers,
charmers, butchers, smokers..
costumed salesmen, neon signs, splashing women
hot baking, hot roasting
and the smell of only rain as if
it were the one remaining element
as if it had rained so long -- enough to soak entirely through
taking.. becoming the scent of everything else in the square
and the next square
and the next square
and my home..

Turning one corner took me around many and I was lost.
His door was gone so
I wandered late
waist deep sometimes
and near the end of the dusk hour I waded into the place that was supposed to be mine -- I found it as I had never seen it.
Thin splitting posts held the banister
sloped down to my face
studying
the mess of reeds
scrubbing with current
the soggy, blood painted stairs.

The creature rolls it's tongue
longing for it's foggy breath
and for the road where it used to lay in the late winter nights.


strangers -- these city streets
(doesn't it take one to know one..?)
when are they this quiet, anyway?
And no smell of cattle! No stars at all..

she wakes.

she rolls decidedly away.

I'm a hunchback.

I take this shell
I snap it light in my hand
roll its dust in my fingers
slice deep