When The City Sleeps

To sit and do nothing was hardest. Where he grew up, nothing was still: the city created itself backwards and forwards, sweeping time out of corners, fluffing the pillows like someone afraid of sleep. Days ended with a groan, like buildings before the wrecker’s ball, thoughts rising and falling, dreams a kind of dust.

The Abandonment Of Desire

He abandoned desire. The flowers grew slowly around the hole in his chest. When his lover sighed, they trembled.

Thanking Her

He thanked her. His words were musical and green, a meadowful of birds disappearing before her eyes and returning in her next life as an inspiration, a tune in her head, the beat of her heart. He said:

“I’ll keep on. The path leads nowhere and I follow, stopping here and there — friends in their tiny houses of time greet me, let me read the papers, brush the corruption of the age off my great hairy coat, shed my skin, my sex, my country, and step out lighter, less and more myself, my direction certain. Thank God for friends.”