Gates were sealed shut at Hightower Singles Bar. Prison hulks (or drinks in plastic cups) ferried thoughts all night long, embodied in silence, drunkeness, and strutting human flesh.

Heart in hand, hand over heart, he woke floating upside down admist the glitter of the bay; an alligator who never had any taste for the stalk and chase.

Sabbath again (last night it was the festival of earthen lamps in that oppposie country; it doesn't matter. He is free and lost). At the table (in the absence of whispered prayer) a lamenting cantata by Bach on CD, as his hand absently palms the cracked street map of this place called Soul.

Went back into the darkness to retrive a book when I found these other ones you had given me some six years ago in another fall.

I had discarded nearly everything you gave me except these few books, even though that other set of sewen pages (or days) had no value left at the end, these were bricks in that wall I built around my bed.

Finally, today time had done its work. An arabesque of yellow-green mold was woven through your inscriptions on their fronts: happy birthdays, wishes, loves etc.

I left them by the trashcan on the sidewalk.

Light pushing through the darkness, traces of fog, and dim shapes of birds at the feeder: signs of things to come.

Yet my eyes are heavy with the weight of sleep, pierced with shards of talk: that alloy of anger, sadness, and pain, shaped like a liminal bubble that wrapped itself around long nights of talk and what passed for love, was perhaps love, and these half-lit mornings that followed.