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| michael c. lewis |  | 1. London's Late Light I spy thick black ships trawling through the sky, looking through the new hole in my belt. My finger still bleeds, or is it Stanley's blood from when I poked him in the eye? But Stanley's ship has long sailed, taken by the virus, the one he stabbed me with, leaving me with nothing but his knife to crack tins of soup in the dark, to make new eyes in my belt, the only work I'll give myself, now they've forgotten me to go fight the Afghans, left me to the dust, to the pleurisy infecting London's left lung, with nothing but Stanley's knife. 2. Old Shoes If I had six months to live, would you help fund a bottle of rare absinthe? Old enough for Van-Gogh to have bought - but missed - A shelf too high up for Toulouse-Lautrec to have reached, too expensive for Hemingway, in his early days, found in a cellar under the rubble of a cafe? That I might drink and leave the world unseen... I'd need no memorial, tomb or urn, nor the Parisian setting for my session, just the dank of my depression in my bottom-floor flat, nostalgia for light, and ink to express the taste, the herbs, my thoughts, prior to the ancient high? By all means join me. If not, perhaps we can concoct laudanum? 3. Last Night He didn't sleep last night, not even for one second. Belly swollen like a sandbag, the doctor's floodgates didn't work. And he didn't cry last night, the plastic marbles held it in, and I poked at his eyes like a boy with his first bowling ball, poked at mine like a man with his last, pulling a muscle that ran up my arm to my neck. Two nights, and not a second of sleep. Pores wide and closed, dry bark hacking into my ribs, and, digging deep with his chin (I pushed harder back), he touched my lung and winded me; when he closed his eyes, I could breathe again, when I closed mine I didn't notice. 4. A Dear Friend It still works today. It hasn't the kick and stick of last year, nor does it control my resolve. I often think the red-robin of Jane's breast takes me there, but of course it doesn't, I'm not so perverse, and should I fly the straight path - maybe learn a Latin Language - I might rediscover myself a world too late. But then the shape shift and curve of Jane's continent is alluring in its Burlesque, a kiss in a tissue, a beating strawberry in a champagne flute, and I drink from her stained glass, tarnished - nicotine fingernails opening the damp curtains in her crumbling house - and she wants me to get drunk. But it is not the taste of her breast, or lips, the coffee in everyone of our hangovers, the clash of stained teeth, the wine smile of sad clowns, it is the wrinkles that crinkle and sprout from her eyes, and the black smudges, telling us each time it has happened, when the house is lighter, and the rest have left to reflect on their own thinning skin or their very own Jane's mottled skin; it is the cracked nails digging into my back when tears blur the pancake; it is the cigarette laugh in a teacher's lounge, the warm breath gone bad - not bad enough to not love. Yes, it still works today, not with the stick and kick of a year ago, and not in the way we would like. | |
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