battered_gospel pilot The notes replay a single piano key against silence. Key by key they, as if footsteps in snow, make there mark in the quiet white. There is no way to undo them once played they are cards already bluffed-- A flush if the path is found. There is no way to cheat the past; It's the present that can lose if the song turns sour should a note be sung shrill. Tap the baton and raise your arms assuming the rest will notice. (If only one would notice) I lack the air I lack the tune. Silence purrs like sicadas in my ears I am alone now. The sky, the trees, the city Will offer their arms or eyes or fingers (any appendage they may have) to console the lost choir boy: runny nose, wet cheeks. You have forgotten the song and still the melody haunts me. Here in this life you are a war cry in my heart, a battered gospel, a slave hymn. Return! Return! The silence seeps in, the red crash of each note stained against white. It cannot be said that all soldiers return. Troops pass in battle. The brass parade caterwalls its welcome. I remain silent among a chorus of singers. 081204 ... pilot You have passed through me, threshold bare. You inserted the key, teeth entangled inside with the power to manuever my hardware. I am open as you left me. Waiting against a blue background and a portrait of flowers in a vase, a boy's casing laid over a chair: Metamorphosis of the Nymph. I am now, because of you. We have history and story to share and chew and suck every detail. I extract it with my straw-tongue, drinking nectar from foreign lillies and past bouquets. Time is a train. We are at the same station awaiting different destinations. In my mind I fantasize the return of the romanticism. Mexico is in my viens now. I am unable to unyoke the change. It is evident in my outlook (I have you to thank). If it were as easy as wiping the chalk from the board, perhaps the eraser would oblige. But there is no mathematics to uncode or systemize the probability of forgetting. You are there. In this house, the door stays open. It waits for the unlikely return as an old dog, too tired and weary to wander for new trails. 081204 ... pilot The hand returns 21 jewels turned gears and shifted seconds. The minutes collected, the hours gathered, and now the rotation completes. There is nothing left of April when you left. I remember the silence that entered as I lay waiting inside my tomb. I waited for it to take me, unsuccessfuly. I can now forget you as the solstice. A soldier died: another retrieves his gun and leaves the corpse wayside. I am another person, and what we were has been outgrown like a stiff shell. The hermit finds a new hole to call home. I travel alone now. Sleepeatanddrink alone. I breathe my moments without your scent. There is nothing I can't do I simply do it without you. You are a dulled shade, you have faded against the sand that has grown in the base. One grain at a time and you have disappeared as quickly and silently as time itself. 090108 ... pilot Down the rabbit hole (a hidden mess, a fancy scribble)! I am shielded inside this glove, the earth taking my body in its mouth promising an exemption from the cerebral telegrams that register as pain. Please, Doctor, let me forget this all: I develop a many-faceted story within myself, a well-collected drama within my head playing each back as slides across a screen. Directions: Enter stage right, exit left then straight through a darkened tunnel to an end! Will it end? Is your every move a gesture of a beginning? …and again, and again. Realign. I am troubled to tears, driven to drink and all other clichés imaginable in this strategy-less game in which we keep dancing across a chessboard—no calculated moves, just murmurs and grunts and jabs of hit and miss success. And this terrible epic of you scathing me with your use-- I, codependent to your usage. 090520 what's it to you? who go blather from