1:X

A few days passed without words between us, I’ve neglected you in paper only, my spirit

Tormented as ever by my own misadventures. Bought a Black Forrest at Veniero’s on 11th, walked it through the Village

And taxied it to Brooklyn for the Doctor’s birthday, she drank bourbon despite raging allergies

Long Haired Biker from Tennessee singled me out from almost the moment we arrived, crazed wolf in Eskimo clothing

He gripped onto me with dirty fingernails accelerating from zero to a hundred in a nanosecond, his creepy hairless cat gazing little alien

Licking my toes under the coffee table, I had refused to get on his hog and left him alone with baldy in bare dwelling, Long Island City,

Rode free for thirty dollars back over the bridge looking at the Empire State Building’s guiding lights

As the car sped toward them. Showered the grime away and sang to the bath tiles and mouldy curtain,

Tried to sing a note again in bed almost asleep at 4am sounding like a mouse peeping just to confirm he’s still alive, I heard myself from outside my own body,

Now LHB won’t leave me alone, the messages rain hard and fast and I’m a little afraid to not answer or tell him he’s got the wrong girl.

Maybe this is underestimation, maybe this is fleeting futile freaked out filly overshooting the mark sick and sprinting wildly west

For no reason towards nothing, possessed. Tonight I’ll wash it down with sake and vinegary octopus with GS

I won’t tell him what happened, he doesn’t like to hear about that sort of thing, and I’ll walk home in the penitent night

Breathe the air a little deeper and swing my arms a little wider to demonstrate my vital liberty

Take the long route and put the trash out for the Psychic next door who’s terrified of the rats.

2:VIII

Ginsberg, the dilapidated tiles in West End Bar at Columbia now a bus boy’s monorail from Cuban kitchen to hollowed out dining room

Booths lined up, washed out, mahogany bookend to bookend, a miniature palm or two to fill the cavernous spaces, concealing the peeling woodwork

Did your elbows respite on that same wounded bar who nursed my penchant for duality, or did they rip it out from under you and lay me down a new one? I couldn’t know.

Dumbed myself down for the twentieth time in my beer, absconding into ruminations of you in that back booth waxing magnificent (or dumbing yourself down?)

Rejoined reality, dumbed myself down for the last time with the voids once inhabited by your bequest casting eyeballs over my parenthetical female

Foray into dumbing down of the girl, hushed the higher meditations for lower harmonies

Hid in palpable shadows of conception traversing visions of imminent insipidity:

Nightshifts ad infinitum “til death do us in”, marital sciatica nicking kinetic kindness until, paralysed, we fall on our knees in alimony—a billion words, unpenned.

West End Bar who watched you become you, watched my anaemic platitudes; we both left with much work left to do.

Out there the snow makes a Narnia out of the university grounds coating every naked tree illuminated by goblin lampposts and fairy-lights

You, the missing lion. The chill, irreconcilable.