When the storm came, I thought of signs. A red Budweiser memory speaking in almost unintelligible script, a women with long blonde hair and a knife in her pocket that took me back to the sounds of church and imagined images of ghosts, the powder smell of a man’s shoulder in a crowded room (I must brush against it and hide from him because he will soon be murdered by time), a room that had never really been crowded but that I remember as empty and long, colored by the glow of candles in burgundy jars, and still echoing with the music of troubadours and heavy with the smell of ink and ivory and the repetitiveness of funeral smoke. False poetry.
I waited for you in the rain. For years, drifting years. I waited for you in the pews on which the midnight attendees had left their bibles opened to pages I read one by one, re-imagining their experience of homily and devotional horror. Their conversations were cluttered with sins trivial as toys, expressions of guilt they’d read about as children, of feeling about feeling and loss and gain; and in between breathing, in those prepositional pauses (but prepositional to what?), where listening is the accumulation of beats, I heard water, water dripping, drops falling one after another. I listened harder. One second, one drop, another second, another drop, several echoes, and the soft brushing of candle flames against the air, which is the sound of a sleeping house, then thunder that sounds like the cracking of stone.
I waited for you in the rain, like a forgotten film. I listen. I watch you penetrate an empty room. Look behind you now. It’s possible I could be watching, breaking the logic of the order of things: successiveness, passage, syntax, endless doors, hierarchy, juxtaposition). My life is pure speculation, an infinite circle of edited scripts.
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