Solitude, #D49


		
		It's too hot outside to take a walk.
		I think about writing a poem
		but realize I don't have anything
		more to say than I did yesterday.
		Possibly it would be more apt 
		to say that even though I've
		something to say I've decided
		it no longer matters if I say it.

		
		Somebody across town has
		grown a yardful of flowers going
		for $5 a bunch.  I think how if
		everybody in town bought some
		that yard would look pretty sad.
		I think how pretty yellow flowers
		would look in the vase on my
		table.  They'd make all the

		
		difference, like a raw bout of
		sex after long abstinence.
		I think about things like this
		all day with the heat 
		locked up outside, a
		vase on the table all ready
		for filling, and my mouth empty
		of someone to say things to.

		
		
		reconstruction in parallel mode


		
		you and the
		night
		are similar
		your blacks absorb me
		into a kind of
		nakedness
		an approximate shift
		appropriating light

		
		you have
		warned me of
		the need for secrecy
		and now you
		whisper the
		way a room does
		when there's no
		one in it

		
		a source of
		vacancy's identified you
		open the window to fill it
		these
		fragile nested dimensions
		ache beneath a
		weight like
		tenderness

		
		
		the background hum of appliances


		
		now while you're here
		is when I fear
		the time you won't be
		when rearranging my 
		limbs I won't meet
		your body's resistance
		or finding the sheet gone
		can't wrestle you for it
		only wrap myself in its
		cold folds
		hugging close a pillow
		permanently molded
		to your head's impression

		
		that's how my life is now
		no longer the way it was 
		when you were someone
		whose face lay on pillows
		in rooms I'd never been in
		where it made no difference 
		to me one way or the other
		if in the long dark hours
		the flesh you aroused
		wasn't mine
		now it matters
		now my life 
		has your breath in it

		
		and is shaped to your size
		it has absorbed and
		assimilated you
		you make sense in it
		in ways other people didn't
		lying beside you I listen
		past the drone of the 
		refrigerator for
		things you may be saying 
		to me not in so many words 
		but otherwise 
		hoping what I hear
		is the sound of your staying

		
		
		he said don't let any of it corrupt you


		
		... but you know how insidious corruption can be how it 
		oozes through the veins and out the pores how it stains 
		the way it makes love to you in the deepest corners
		raping you in midnight alleys and whispering always 
		whispering until you swear there's only the one voice  
		sliding like a touch up and down your skin spreading 
		everything wide so you're helpless spreadeagled tied up 
		and you've forgotten the safeword if there ever was one 
		not that saying it would make any difference anyway ...

		
		I said I'll try not.