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

Writing poetry is hard, like pouring concrete (and as intense as making love), first one has to frame the body of the poem, this takes more than hands it takes the eyes, the mouth and the feet. It takes the whole weight of the body to press down on the mortar of alphabet.

It takes warm blood to forge the memories into bars of reinforcement, bars that will hold the words in place, that will provide the shape, bars that will hear the moans ("I want to make you moan", I tell the poem) as the words shudder gripping their bones ("I want to make you shudder", I tell the poem) and slowy harden into a poem... ("Take me in", I tell the poem, "and shatter me under your dome")

                           Like this.

2003:02:04 14:00 Atlanta