"Solitude. Hailey's bare feet.And all her patience now assumes."

The nine day sword has already rusted
by the time my flesh riverbeds into openness.
This is how the sky feels,
I gasp,
(still running beneath it,)
torn wide and bloodless.
Polished to an echoing sheen
by ink tongues spit and bleed.
Somehow,
for once,
not a contradiction.

It’s probably fortunate,
he goes on. Rips out a tooth and lays it on the table.
Leaves it. Leaves me
studying its pearlescent whiteness.

That’s one way to look at it,
he says, and spitshines a mirror.
Holds it in front of his face.
Asks me to stare.
Eyes and eyes needle through me.

I’m at a loss
Silly, each time. without fail
Learning to unhand an invented palm.
Certainly I could find lines there.
I could even fool myself and say I read them.
See them.

The cracks. The truth is I read another truth.
All I have. What I say now.

I saw nothing. I saw stones.
I saw your eyes.

On fire. Blaze a breeze. | I'll devastate the world

"Reveille Rebel"

late hour

Something again in the smile I can't place.

                How it creeps in after years
    and the black bark unlit behind.

"The old house, for those who know how to listen, is a sort of geometry of echoes. The voices of the past do not sound the same in the big room as in the little chamber, and calls on the stairs have yet another sound. Among the most difficult of memories, well beyond any geometry that can be drawn, we must recapture the quality of the light..."

"Riu's house stands out on the sky,
                with glitter of colour
As Butei of Kan had made the high golden lotus
               to gather his dews,
Before it another house which I do not know:
How shall we know all the friends
               whom we meet on strange roadways?"

Perhaps preceded only once by those lips sloping off into points and the blurred eyes downcast.

I've developed this habit lately (I say lately, but that only describes how long I've consciously been aware of it). In a daydream or a reverie I end up remembering some past encounter or incident or even, occasionally, something that didn't happen at all. They're always in the first-person. And if it's a pleasant memory I will suddenly emulate the smile I had on my face at the time, and if it's an unpleasant memory I might grimace. I think I wrote about this earlier, about metaphors that weren't metaphors.

I had a moment where it happened again. It was at the edge of morning, and I was leaving the apartments. There was something happy (re)playing at the back of my mind, and since it was too early to have things at the front of my mind, I smiled. I think there was laughing in the memory. I don't remember what it was now. There's a girl about my age who I see around the place, probably has a room here. She mostly lives as a peripheral blur. I've only ever seen her in passing, a half-familiar face. Today her hair was glistening from a rain shower that was already destroying the snow that had arrived the evening before. She was entering as I was exiting, and crossed into the path of my eyes before I could look away, or drop my smile, and I'd slipped into her gaze, and so she mistook my echo of a grin as directed at her - as directed at all, I suppose.

And her eyes brightened and she gave me the first genuine smile I've received for god knows how long. As if she recognised me. Or as if she didn't need to recognise me. As if she knew exactly what my face meant, and knew also how often it meant nothing at all, as if she took all that and let it fall between her fingers anyway. As if she were some accident of positioning, the hunched hollow of some rock face, shrouded by trees, on a mountain opposite someone's call already ended. And then she turned against the door and was inside, and I'd ended up by the gates.