there are ghosts and there are the ghosts of ghosts, and behind them hosts hanging stout in the cieling stains and the this close to almost under the warping floorboards. They all come together to dance a little dance macabre, here where the wind has been absent for days the biscuit dense fog furls out of the delta and honeycomb swirls about those shorty hills masquerading as mountains, and then the high buildings masquerading as organic landscape, parade parched on the changing horizon, only the sun is a constant, and only if he is barely that.

I had a three martini dinner, I am running the bath. Just for me and my ghosts, we will be parfumed and annointed and no one is going to lose their head, not just yet. I am hoping that all that hot water is going to unclench the muscles in my back where my wings should be, and all that residual tension I carry so closely to my heart... I have had my heart ripped from me and I am not sure that I have taken the right exit, and I've a surfeit of anger in my molars, all the real and true physical ailments that bedevil me in a ghost's wake, I take deep breaths and turn in the sheets. My ghosts are all quick and porpoise fine, crouched over the future, clad in the resolute firmaments of the past. They are just memories after all, it's no talisman and it's no prophecy. It's just a little of residual love, it was the headiness of a deep crush, it's a lot of me and a lot of you, and it gets as good as gone with the deep morning fog about as our heads as a weighty and shapeless chandelier.

I am fraying at the edges and I am paint peeling, and I am a desperately poor metaphor. And that paltry non sentence is enough to sum up my absence, and yet there has been so much in between. There always is. There is the music of the television I catch in glimpses, there is the beauty of the phrases that I read............. and here I deleted a paragraph that I can't retrieve...........

I just want to fall, and I just want to disappear. I can take the money and run, I'm lucky in that regard, I could go and go and go for a number of days and maybe that would be just be enough to set me just a little free of myself, and maybe the fates... or barring that the lottery would intervene, or the stars, or a supernova, I could just go, leaving all of those old songs on the roadside for others, roadside currency, roadside karaoke, sing me a song, I'll sing you a lullalby, this is my breast and here is where my heart should beat, but in it's stead a metronome beats out the measure of my life... My heart was swallowed by Jonas, who was swallowed by the whale, and he navigates the depths of the sea without the slightest hint of regret. So courses my lifeblood, madly navigating the depths of the Marianna Trench, so many leagues, so much pressure, it's a wonder that I haven't burst yet, in my car or in a bar.

yes, but that is what the drugs and the preservatives are for, splash of additive and a dash of formyhehide, a swift draught of anti-freeze to ward of the night chills and the absence of love.

I see you, I feel you, my little reprobate, darkening my blood, blackening my dreams, squeezing, squeezing, you and your python's nature. You will cut me off and you will cut me down, pawn, prey, pray, dawn. It would be easy enough to stop breathing, maybe easier said than done, takes a certain discipline to be prone in one's bed and to command the self, ok that's enough, I'll stop breathing now, and I will stop eating, and I will stop drinking wine and water.......... and no vice and no caffeine, and no more fun, only fussy sanctity and all the sex you will never have again, and all the sex with him you will never have again after tommorow.

yes, it's true, tomorrow, it's the final farewell to the engineer, I have been biding my goodbye's for weeks and yet I continue to bead tears like dew drops, I continue to break and break again, I have shattered so completely that I am but the hazy diamond dust shading every frontier we ever crossed and ever will, I am but the gauze and you he is but the gossamer, at some point tomorrow, on some cue that I will know instinctively we will be rent, and that as they say will be that, evermore, or as the raven cried nevermore.

As of tomorrow, after the renting, I will be done with love. There are other loves, there is beauty, and there is friendship and there is family, and those are good and solid loves, the stalwart loves, the politic and the impolitic loves, forever and a day loves, the forgiven loves, and the loves that forgave. I am but the sum of what I love, I am only what I love, and so when the salt has been poured and the water has been doused, what else can I be but some refracted myth, living, breathing, farting - just a girl, only a girl, a woman by proxy, but only by proxy, heaving, dry heaving all of that loss, it comes up thick and viscous, streams of us, up and out, you purge, like a hamburger, like life, the last taste of the last kiss, like after I pulled you (unwilling) around me like the security blanket I never slept with, but I slept still nonetheless.

so farewell then. so farewell, then. I know how this story ends, it bodes ill for you and I, you can never go back.

But we will always have the tarmac....

Indigo, Indigo, on the fifth of November. Deep blue and a hastening moon, and something about a Fawkes and something about an explosion, and a revolution, but that was all along time ago, somewhere between history and myth where all good tales lie, and lie.

All of that and all of the rest on the periphery as I walk home, dilly up the hill, in flip flops and a hoodie, shiny of toenail and recently fucked with the nearly tumescent moon at my back and a licorice dark saddness twining my heart like an edible ivy. The raw garlic on my breath should cleanse my blood and ward off the suitors and vampires alike. Fall into old rituals with old friends, stand at the stove over a slab of meat like as near to a year of Sundays with him hadn't ever passed, like an extended reverie as I stand testing the rareness on one leg, bad ankle cocked on my standing knee.

Mild in November, while the rest of the country shrugs off the frost, and shrugs into coats I shrug out of my sweatshirt, like we sloughed off the sheets, at the beach break. Sun kissed and beard scorched in this short reprieve, before he goes. And to some it may be a great exercise in heartache, a deep pull from the well of the ludicrous, but I have made my peace with the critics. Best I figure, I'll take the love with the licks for those scant precious hours of happiness, tinged with the inevitable maddness of loss. In a matter of days, a mere couple of weeks and he will be gone and so will I. I repeat it like an incantation, he is gone, he is gone, he is gone, even when he has wrapped his body around mine and I have disappeared into his breast, he is gone, but this, this moment, this kiss, last night's martini, the way he looked at me askance, that, that is mine, it is all mine. Mine to savor, or mine to forget, mine to horde and mine to give, mine, mine to pitch to the stars, soft and blue, deepest indigo, as colossal as the sea.