Vox Humana

You are not reading this.  I have to remind myself.  This is the pretense of conversation hissed into a phone.

(Note to Self: Never kiss Ingrid Bergman, too much consequence and too little return.) 

You can see the other's, the voiceless presence given shape and volume by her plaintive tone.  He is uncomfortable.  He is squirming somewhere.  Like the current in the walls, the wires she sets fire to might ignite a bomb in any corner of his world.  Her love has been incendiary.  My love has not been love.  So here, at 3 a.m., night's precipice, the dial tone only able to choke us back five short minutes, I am standing.  I am standing alone.  She is a landscape defeated.  She is smoldering.  She is comatose, the hangover of war (not love but war) as you burn on the wire, waiting.

Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving.    --Jean Cocteau

And so it goes, each night, fighting sleep to find my muse again:  I want you to call (or write, or get your knees muddy crouching low to see me in the well of the basement window).  Of your own initiative, I want you to waste an hour looking for the address, for the phone number, that I gave you nine years ago and that by sheer laziness you have never thrown away, a yellow post it with dust and ink undermining the adhesive with only my last name scribbled above the numbers that I had clumsily written worried at the time that you would leave me before you had contact...

How many times has my vessel, my body, passed close enough to moons or planets or dark massive stars turned into themselves and felt the pull of their gravity?  How many faces, torsos, eyes have I fallen into drunk enough to sleep, stoned enough to idle for hours gazing at the stars.