I see you staring,
your familiar brown eyes
staring back at me.

That's all I see -

dusty hair and
frozen knuckles and
lifeless legs and
dry lifeless
tan skin.

I don't move, or else
an unmoving image of me
bursts to life for you
real again perhaps
and not just a dream,
motivates a tensing
on your brow toward a telling
once again
of loneliness and boredom --

perhaps envy?

God,
as I stand here
my head clenches up tight
inside and aches for hours
afterwards; my heart
feels as if it extends
for every next beat
and tears itself up
in the course of it.

I don't push the door,
open it just a bit to see
a litte more.

If I remain just here, perhaps
the pictures inside your head
flow on free
in your mental breeze
(your mental breeze!).

In your mental breeze
the pictures flow
just as they always have,
in a mental sphere,
I can only believe.

And perhaps in these years
they'll emerge a little more as real,
claim in whisper
a space,
a real place,
and mean something
to you besides anguish
and boredom.  You,
in an exact, exact
space.

No waiting,
I guess, or informing,
or affecting,
or dispatching
some wonderful sensibilities
and fancies,
or receiving from everybody
who gives a hoot about you.

Or gave a hoot.
Or could just give it
in that space
absent the anxiety
and terrible animal burden.
Oh God when I stand here
staring -- and arrested --
my head aches so much for you.

I don't move,
so much as a shiver.

Or
make
a squeak.

Those pictures moving on
in your mental breeze, I do hope,
take on a little bright life,
take you with them, well,
into a creation fundamentally
so hidden from this world
of ours.

Your pictures of excellence,
strong women and men
dancing and detailing within the fog,
running with such bursting energy
and running and running, and yes!
-- so tending carefully to details,
the grooming and picking
and stroking of hair and skin,
in dance.

The tiny movements
in the atmosphere
and superimposed
onto fathomless exuberance,
just like the colors
washing over colors on paper.

-- if you really think about it, my friend,
not so contrary, not so abstract.
The colors,
dances
and pictures
flowing
through the mind.

Well, these friends of yours
I guess live like gods,
the impulsions of imaginations
and desires, or like a celebration
through time
on timeless display,
like a colorful flag
flowing in the tempering
for all beyond the boundaries
of our human realm
to see.  The flag of our kind flowing.

Yes,
a symbol of us
ornamented just in your hand and
carried beyond
to places unfamiliar,
or at least really not so,
after when this event
passes on inevitably --
so goes the grand
story of things.

When happens the great
resolve in our proceedings
of scanty inhabiting,
(and I imagine your diction,
dogged punches of each
hard sound in your promises),
or perhaps the blinking out
invisibly
and mysteriously,
maybe by mistake.

How strange to consider it, my friend!
To pass through to when,
graspable or not,
new personhood thrives,
and such performances
and poetry.

Quite completely
a new essence.
Unspeakable not
just in our minds,
but by bodies
and faces
so wholly
inappropriate.

And while in these
totalities the split of each unyielding,
an epic of one about the other
at best fantasy and speculation,
and perhaps derivation
by a later breed of the former,
infinately retreats
from each other world.

Not so,
because you lay open
to the non-human realm.
And as it is, bravo!
To percieve
with instinct
and godlike connection
another stirring
of animal survival

and ourselves

-- oh
God,
my head hurts
and heart aches.
When the fog passes away
like this,
perhaps so moves an itching
of enervated muscles,
so suddenly dissuading
torpidity --
frightening to surrender
invisibility.

How long
has it been?
Did I associate
or dream?
Sooth a spirit
or enthrall one while
another sickened to death?

But I don't touch the door
between you and me.  I
discern with great familiarity
an entelechy of anger
and frustration on that brow,
once so much more
in your personage
and now like a laser
of sunlight burning,
the absence of all other faculty
augmented into prominence
and repugnance.

Aw Jesus, am I anywhere
close?

Through the sliver -- a few inches more
but enough to cover half my face and
separate you completely from me --
I can see your eyes directed
at mine,
as always,
and a skinny leg in sight,
gaunt hide and a face.

Once I saw you stirring:
When knuckles of a fist whitened
over the wooden arm of a chair, I thought
I saw some stirring in them.
Like color waves washing
through the tides
on bubbles about to burst,
I thought I saw flickering
inside them, the excitement of little waves
dancing on pearls poised above
oyster shells,
five bone white pearls
burped out from the deep inside
and stuck there.

For each, a little breeze
that moved across the globe.

I thought perhaps you sought
the agitation of flesh,
an ignition preceding
the turning of gears
-- or hands of time --
the chance to lift despair
and a body from a chair.
Not so bad
or even important.
Just imagine the outside, and
the looking in.  You need
success and perhaps
a little prayer.

Pray a little.
The tool is well.
The concentration deep inside
-- distraction hiding only,
thus my tears reply.
That's the main thing, concentration.
And it's a dream.

So the bubble burst, landing
you right back in a chair
in a dark room with dusty
sunlight stirring between you
and a greasy window behind your head,
over a creaky wooden slatted floor,
behind a dark and dusty
door.  And the longing
and angry stare at me
taking shape on your brow.

With a thump of my heart
inside my chest I turned away
to sever a thread of wonderment
and inanimation.
With a terrible ache drowning
in unconsciousness
deep inside me,
I left.

Today I reflect on this
while I stare at you and
your brown eyes staring at mine.
You, familiarity woven
in over a body
and face
and eyes.  God,
I love you
when I picture the way things used to be --
all still there, I'm so afraid.
But
this is where my flesh takes over.

So with burdens in my head
and aches in my heart,
I prime muscles, rehearse
the coordinations in a journey
through a doorway
to a dark hallway,
and stare unblinking at your eyes
staring back at me.