She moved the way a baritone voice rattles in your ear
Toward me and the fingers wrapped around
My own seemed fragile and I could see
Every immeasurable shiver that coursed through
My body into y hand which looked older than it should.
There was a song that might have been about love playing somewhere nearby
Not in the room but close enough where I could hear it all muffled
And the cadence of the singer made it impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman
Who was singing and it reminded me almost as if the gravel that gathered
At the bottom of Louis Armstrong’s voice was isolated and pitched up.
Her voice played in time with the muted gravel
And every time she grasped tighter I would sigh.
And suddenly my mind left
And I coughed mahogany colors
That felt like ice in my throat
The time it took to realize that time didn’t exist
Made his head hurt and presented newer and brighter questions
And in a fit of new perception of the now
He just sat
And took it all in
For God only knows how long
Jamming to Silversun Pickups’ “Lazy Eye” with Josh.
A woman passed by
Dressed relatively well for being so obviously homeless,
Pushed snugly into her top for best results.
Asked me for seventy-five cents.
I offered twenty-five and she declined.
Couldn’t have been too desperate.
A man passed by
Skin cured by the sun and a beard far too unkempt
For him to be anything but homeless.
Asked me, without any sort of
Provocation, who exactly I thought I was.
I told him I wasn’t sure at all.
He mumbled, ‘Good answer’, and kept walking.
It’s so typical of me, really.
I can’t finish what I start. I don’t think I’ll ever finish writing a book, or
22 seconds of a performance of “Delicate”, without vocals.
Lucid
“Do ya ever think that maybe all of this is just a dream? Reality, I mean?”
“Yeah, sure. I think about that possibility sometimes.”
“Suppose it is a dream, and this is all in your head. Why then are there things like famine and political strife and shit? And why aren’t you a millionaire?”
“Dunno. I have dreams sometimes where I’m super-rich. But I also have dreams where my life sucks worse than it does when I’m awake. I can never change it. I’m too lazy to work on lucid dreaming. And this— Reality— would be, like, the ultimate dream. Where no lucidity is possible. Or something.”
“It just would suck if this were a dream. Then when you finally wake up, it’d be so frustrating that you couldn’t have made it better. And that things were so confusing and sucky in the first place.”
She takes in handfuls of down
(tightly gripping off-white sheets)
ers and asks me why
(nothing ever lasts as long as it should)
she is so depressed, and
(switches her grip to my arms)
why she cannot now remember
(why exactly I am in love)
what her own name is.
