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John Grey |
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HAZE OF TRAVEL brochures and motel rooms, statues and you beside me, I unfolded the place we stayed, sketched the day's routine in the bed-sheet, kissed the man who founded this town, read your scroll, your dates, your history, wiped the pigeon crap from the folds of your brow CAROLING this Christmas, the knock on my door like an ultimatum, the choir rooted to the snow, feasting on their own forgiveness, and me, songless and aiming to keep it that way, brushing them off like lint, like the telephone I don't answer, like the bath-water that runs and runs, spilling through the crack in the tiles down on where I'll be mopping up my memories later, another year knotting me like stereo cords, with deaths and inhuman conquests, and these damn voices chanting how I ought to forgive it twelve months' monstrous indulgences with a warm, smug listen, with an almighty grin, and I can remember how Jenny hummed all over the place the day she died, and the songs Cliff scrawled on everything he could get his shaky hands on settling their argument in his upturned, wasted eyes, and how I was seventeen way too long, over the hills and far away too long, cutting my wrists on the teeth of mad women who only knew the choruses to love and the words of disgraced sages booming from three story apocalypses in between mis-sung phrases of some gutless hit parade song while they circumferenced and spot-checked my life to see if they still ran it, and you think I want to holler "Oh come all ye faithful" to the ones who betrayed me or "God rest ye merry gentlemen" to those who haven't the guts for lying still WINDY NIGHT, 2 A.M. Why bother blowing, Martha asks the wind. I'm too heavy for you to blow me around. And besides, even if you could float and move this body, I'd be too drunk to realize it wasn't me doing it. Okay, so muss up my hair a little, flutter my dress. A man did that to me once. So if you see him, tell the man wind, Martha says hello. |