Alterations

Our night dances betray themselves: the shelf where your books used to sit only collects dust, and hardcovers beg for porcelain owls to protect. Unread, the bloodletting words shrivel and puss with a clot where the center was once waiting. A coffee stained cover remains the surest way to tell a lover has yet to let go. But the careful calculation of a goodnight tucks the goodbye into cold sheets, so no fleshy tones provide release from a four-concrete cell of chain-smoked forget-me-nots and a knotted stomach--all when I return to my riddled lot, a begotten desire to maintain trivial distance. In a corner sour cushions punctuate an hour, looped on a lamp a belt buckles my knees. Lying in an icy puddle, just the peak of two tips drowned under rusted smells of color, which runs down a sketched map creating the illusion of clenched knuckles unprepared to loosen. Coincidence teaches nothing but the value of real estate, escape from this black hole city offers only brief repentance, and to relay is to imply I wish to own a name. Jealous of shapeless forms projected from the magic lamp of your mind, I contort until I find that hole where my childish imagine need be forced, else I toy with excitement from meaningless meetings between artists who know only of aesthetics. I wish to know more about physical forms in the unusual way: to see smoke spiral and sway, uncertain of when the night becomes the day. A tangible change I struggle to embrace. More than a night dance for shelter from the rain.