i walked
in black abyss,
dark & blind,

found stars,
radiant salt,
& white.

They say grace now; promise fire in the future,
and warmth and brightness always.

interlude

what is the taste of love?
-beers drowned in amaretto, liquid almonds with a little poison, steeped from the stone hearts of summer, love does not taste like you.
-orgasms, love does not taste like you.
-james joyce, oh poldy, poldy bloom, your molly who is going to leave you, yes, yes, oh yes, and i yes, yes your stream of conscious sweetness while you sleep, love, love does not taste like you, nor your old nostalgia pages.

am i blue? billie asks me. blue billie, i'm not like you. i don't cry, and no man's left me. the world is old and filled with lies, and i can lie too. it was a woman who killed lucifer.

-

there was a fire in chinatown, and it left a blackened stone-brick skeleton, all concrete and charred, and i fell in love with its burnt hollowness. is it bizarre to feel this, to love decrepit, aging buildings? the attraction's all in the expression, the honest ugliness.
they can't lie, so they stand in the rain, waiting to be demolished.

there's an art to lying; it is the craft of story-weaving and selling desire. you take a set of images, linked only by the person who commits them, and tie them together to make a narrative that people want to buy, like a bundle of frail papers with secrets, or withering blossoms.

i don't want to be eloquent. i don't want art. i don't want jacquard floors. i don't want to know that we are only chemicals and fiction.
i don't want to make love letters to ugly, miserable, disgusting (beautiful!) despair, who digs into me with her hooked ring, and her androgynous twin, desire, who possesses the space where my metaphysical heart should be, and breathes through my pores, and lives alone in his/her mirrored chambers.

perhaps i am poetry. i don't think poetry can live in a body like mine, or maybe that's why it does. or perhaps the world is too heavy sometimes, with it's grey nights, and overflowing fog, smog in the city. or perhaps i don't love people, only ideas, because people can't appreciate the world. or maybe i was born strange in the head, and now i love walls and dirt, and blackness, and mourning, and see truths too clearly to want to play cat's cradle and repeat cycles with liars; they are all liars.

or maybe i don't know the heart of what's real when it looks back at me.

i.
The songstress opens her mouth. She is petite, a china doll.
Her mouth, song is Shanghai, 1920.
 
I close a semi-gloved left hand to my heart.
Shanghai, Shanghai; Mandarin, I do not speak, but know the soul of.

She opens her eyes while lilting.  Makes dark-lashed woman lids at me, not at the lonely drunks near me, nor at anyone else in the loud jazz house.
My windows are open; I know her heartbeat. She closes her painted eyes, sways to her own young voice and the piano.
She raises her eyes elsewhere in the room, at other men at various tables. The back of their heads gaze back. Her fingers clutch and twist a strip of fraying microphone cable tightly. She sways her hips when she remembers to.
Her vowels and tonals are off at times, but nobody else knows the ebbing and flowing of Chinese in the room, only the exoticism of her voice.

If I were single, I would rise from where I am eating up her vulnerability. I'd leave my scotch on the oaken steps. I would saunter over, tell her, "I love your singing. Let me buy you a drink." She is twenty-four, and I am twenty-one; this is no matter. A girl is a girl.