It’s Not Like We Never Smiled Again

It’s not like we never smiled again after the bricks came through the windows and the secrets of the garden had become either dark smoke or something worse and chewed over at that.  There is no pleasure in seeing photos of past lives in present tense neighborhoods, there is the way a chin is caressed by a fingertip slightly familiar both to the touch and to the memory that has fingerprints and scuff marks on  its imagination.

We grinned, rather, turning our collars up to the cold and damp, victorious as battleships rusted an  in shallow waters that are ports that have derricks burning away the stars and turning every flashlight and lamppost glare a swirling corona of diseased aromas that seep through the tarp that separates the refusal to awaken with the sun and the urge to rise from the bed when the mist settles on the lawn and bring flames to the parties that began the year with lost accents and scribbled notes on damp napkins.

d retired

Needless to say, the palms are damp with expectancy, the tongue swells and cannot utter a groan or a wish. And then the screen fluttered, a sudden swerve of lines becoming something like swerves seen on highway signs telling you how typical this road will become in even the longest run-on sentences.

We blame scenery for our hunger and still we see each other thought one of us is not here in the room or any room the other of us has yet walked into. Fading into nothingness is over rated until it happens at last and there is little remaining of what was assumed would always be there but an outline made of mote and mascara.

 The vanishing becomes the light of our eyes blinking quickly to see all there is even faster because the watches and the clocks are set an hour ahead and no one knows what time it really is .

 Why does this take so long? The longer we talk the darker the light becomes, soon every window will be opened and there will be music of marching bands pouring into the opaque neighborhoods that is the hit parade of a movie we saw and mistook for something that happened in this life we shared from opposite places on the map.