Lying flat on my back on a wooden floor, staring at the ceiling of centuries...

Going back to places only old recollections can take me now; they've vanished around the corner and into the past like the kisses of your long-ago lovers. You'd have to lift those threadbare drapes to get to the studio, climbing up the narrow dark stairs and the world below visible between the slats of the steps. Smells like old smoke, old-fashioned and wistful, mingling with the lingering sting of turpentine that settled around this place.

And below; below the smoke you breathed and believed in such sadness and glory

masked in

a carnival of smiles

for my little-girl memory.

For everyone who bleeds and breathes for love underneath an impassive sky - soon it will disappear into stillness and cease its impassioned lament, only to become sepia-toned reminders, surrounded by cracked picture-frames and paper-thin love letters, of some things that make your heart warm with fondness. Or wince in secret regret.

These days pass like smoke on the wind, lingering with its smell of stale cigarettes and swiftly slipping through the opened windows. And oh, these faint traces of bitter coffee, left untasted and unforgotten reflect the sunless sky, and we wonder. We wonder, don't we? Where are the faces that looked out at your from behind your fifteenth half-sipped saucer of chamomile tea, eyes that blurred as they passed your rain-streaked windowside? It seems to me that we walk this fitful earth in such a saddened reverie, it can hardly be called the light of the living life.

And love, like a neon sign, blinks in and out of desire, crackling kind-of, and illuminating not-a-lot.

Who walks the city streets on a serene Sunday night? Underneath the flattened sun, quietly now, we creep along the cracked pavement and slide by the oft-glanced dirty windows. Suddenly the asphalt runs rivers and we are all afloat upon a scorching sea, no tide to move upon the secret wishes that press against our crudely fashioned wooden hearts.

Toss the rain back up to the sky; the salt of its sadness is everywhere I would not be.

So don't tell me that out of the depths of a winter gloom, warmth came to steal away my solitude. Can't hide behind a veil of falling snow now, true, but it will amaze you how unnerving these dark eyes are, following your every uncomfortable toss of head and brush of arms, through the humid looking-glass of summertime.

I...ah, wish I had held in my hands the soft scaly life that slipped out of your grasp, pulsing still for all the world very like a fish, whose last gasp of life left long ago, on that salted swell underneath the sobbing sky.

It feels so strange when I am on the train not really thinking not really smiling not really scowling not really breathing oh no not at all

Why does it feel like I am following the curving pathways through my half-forgotten memories, sliding gently between the spaces where they jostle in the frank emptiness of my small brain, on a subway into the deep?  And looking out the scarred windows into the sultry heat, everything rendered a mirage by the rising exhale of summer, why do I still see fleeting snowflakes and storm-clad skies?

It seems to me the further I creep into my remembrances of old, the farther I slip away from everything I used to be.

Oh your face used to promise such sweet things, when seen through a veil of falling clouds underneath the deepening gloom of winter twilight.  I had these pretty dreams, you see, my fantasy taking flight from your apparently shy demeanor and your unselfconscious ways.  I can't believe I fell right into you, and you stole everything you wanted, while still keeping yourself from me.  And you still got me.

Don't give me that old 'you're living a lie' because this falsehood has more truth in it than you can know.

I have these memories - visions - that call my name, of places I've never been and times I could never have known, that seem more real to me than this waking life.

And because this myopia will steal your grip on the quickly fading world watch out to whom you entrust your good sense; what advantage can you gain when your last opiate sleep slips and slumbers in the blurry reality of routine.

That old yellow moon ripens, drops right off the star-laden sky, to land with a satisfying plop, in my tea, to mingle with the tears and fishes.

Holy Mother of God, how I love every every every particle of this sweet blessed oblivion, sheer and close and wide and intimately exposed to every living breathing slowly thudding chamber of my heart.

I fell hard against the ground, sliding down the fence as I descended downward, sliding through the humidity and the heat, and the small rocks of the asphalt cut a jagged little path through the side of my face.  But it didn't matter, better than in heaven could I ever feel and damned though I am my father the Devil would never turn me away.

Old Mister Cocaine swimming through my veins you make me feel like home home home

You know me? Sweeping through every inch of me internally, I know you, you sly old murderer you'd sneak up behind me and try to kill me yes you would just like you did that Christmas Eve hidden in the shroud of memory

and they

oh they

left me sitting in a room of emergencies, steaming and the snow melting dripping making rivers on my sad flesh

And this is what it's come to.  The fucking fuck, who walks among the walking smiling at street whores and night watchmen with their big shiny guns, I'd never ever leave oh no no not at all

'Cause like a kitty-katty-tabby-cat I'd have to come slinking back in some summer night looking for a quick fix and a better love, but no life ever blooms under the yellow summer moon.

I could never stay away.

Oh, how I hate what you've turned me into.

Smiling monsters who sleep in the dust, yearning for glory and light, spinning circles and cutting snakey paths through the silt of centuries. And oh, how they creep to places unknown between chain-link fences and sun-filled alleys, all littered with papers flying, flying...

And once, a long time, a lifetime ago, I dreamt of walking and wandering free through snowy streets, my heart unheavy with care, stopping to breathe in my freedom and exhale slowly by the turgid waterside, lined all with unspeakably blank warehouses, always watching, watching...

What is it that I've searched for in the days of my youth? A love, perhaps, a face materializing out of the half-lit nightmares that haunt my heartbeats like the staccato of a thundering metronome, so loud, reminding me with every pulse that sends my thickening blood to feed my groaning body.

And I've found you, after months of waiting in the deepening gloom, only the glow of a cigarette in the darkness, watching your face pass me into the sticky heat of the subway station. You took me completely, into your house, into your bed, and I became prey to your beauty and sadness.

Your dark eyes watch me, they want me, I know. And too innocent to lie I told you the unlovely truths, so why don't you take them? You are not as wise as your age fools you into believing, for all your twenty-four years you cannot tell me from my tales. And is it worth it? I wanted this...I treaded this fantasy in dreams untold, and fools have we all become, gilded in lies and tarnished in thievery, shining in the radiance of my guilt. Come back to me, give me back my tragic illusions and let me alone, so I can once again wonder as I wander a sad little atom in the greyed streets that call my name.

So it's sunny, and I will lay on the ground dead alive, not thinking nor breathing but staring into the skyless expanse of cloud that settles over me. It's like old cigarette smoke; it's been exhaled in sadness and in joy and in thoughfulness and carelessness and it just hangs heavy, reminding me of everything that I might have been if love hadn't sprung its tired trap on me in the last-minute frenzy of despair.

There's nothing to say anymore...

And if there are, better to leave them unsaid and the air left heavy with mystery and misery.

Thank you for listening throughout this past year; you gave a sincere reaction to some stranger you didn't even know, and I'm getting all cliche on you, but I really appreciated it. It means more than I can ever tell in any permutation of pretty words.

One day I'll make it running, and having run, I'll remember you.

So remember me.

Why'd you have to do it?

We all play this foolish game of liar's poker, but you've already won.

Nothing but a cheat and a thief; that's you and oh how you've got me.

If I'll never see you again why do I care?

Thinking of you is something breathless and it makes my heart hurt.

So I'll hold my breath by the pretender's highway by dawn, waiting for that no one to come and save me from the glory of the sun and find me redemption in the dark of night.  With my bare feet I sit on broken glass and how I love these simple pleasures of pain.  The dust rises but nobody's driving down the road; it's just the devil come to offer me a second chance to be myself again.

You....are something not of this side of the planet...

No one ever slid into me so fast no one ever made me come so many times as a matter of fact no one ever touched my rose-white womanhood until you came and robbed me of my own good sense.

And now you're going to be gone.

So I'll let you go, because you will go whether I will or no

And go back to thinking about some strange man who I haven't met yet, that will come and worship me just as I would him; go back to sitting by the clouded window that looks out onto the lonely road; go back to dreaming away my young life in the heavy-lidded stupor of half-sleep.

I guess it's only fair - you never promised me anything anyway.

And what can I do?

Nothing - nothing.

I kiss the air a lingering bitter memory of you wisps of love gone, gone like the person I thought you were.  You said it right when you told me,

"You're nothing but trouble but you're the most innocent thing I've ever fucked."