In the presence of silence (it gleams like a spider's filament) I doll up the words:

honk(a child's teddy bear that say's "Push here" or two geese talking as they fly to the lake)

the horn(of plentitude, pure myth or an unicorn, a horse disfugured)

of the fire truck's(all traffic stops, it passses gleaming red, obsessively polished by hands to remove even the shadow of ash)

Let it wail(only in the distance, only in my sleep when you surface) and never arrive in time,

as the light today burns silence to the ground!

A woman in a red cardigan, gets behind me in the line. She looks at her feet, looks at the stained glass or at the price list, anything to avoid my line of vison, she is unremarkable, only what she is wearing is( very alike like yours).

Nothing else to take me back to you or bring you to me except her red cardigan.

Four tables across, sit two people. Could have been you and me but they are not definately you and me(though I suspect they are becoming you and me). As she grabs his hand(I notice him flinch) he shoots her a wan smile(this is the duck decoy), she notices and takes evasive action. (His smile, the bullet, becomes a question mark that a trick smoker could have placed between them.)

Nothing else to take me back to you or bring you to me except their downcast eyes.

Closer to me, the blue chair is unfilled. Words for both sides of this conversation I easily posit. Even though talking to myself can be misconstrued as looniness, words abrade edginess of remorse and philosophize our shifts.

Nothing else to take me back to you or bring you to me except all the silence!

2003:01:30 15:00 Atlanta (GT)

To what ground have we arrived now? As always the maps are gone and the ships run aground. Each confession spurns on further desires and each agreement grows taut under the weight of implied promises and myths: the myth of finding my soul reflected in another's, the myth of promise, of love's immortality.

Let's not ponder, this is Pitcarin Island, I am the leader of the mutiny, you came before me in your nakedness, for now only your lips. I wish to cleave your other skins too, I want to peel away even the original skin and travel up, upriver in your blood: I am called upon by a vision of hips joined at hip mouth around the breasts as everything swirls around us in the eddies of rash white water.

Isn't this how Life begins?

2003:01:30 13:30 Atlanta