When I Was There A Little Rose Monologue

there is a little rose, silent and bone white living just beyond my reach just alive enough to catch my eye like you used to do when we would go for weeks without eating anything but each other when light itself would follow you around aroused by your scent as eager to join with you as i

now i am thinking of the night you beat me at scrabble with the word cancer and how it was nothing that became something that killed you and how it seems the little rose is reaching out to me the green leaching out of its leaf tips and how the life is leaching out of me as i go weeks now without eating anything like you used to do just before you went silent and bone white

elixir

drought winter has not brought it, but sustains it.
months
now, the nourishment so needed, slows, stops.

oh but the sweet sweet smell of rain passes to the south sending it’s punishing cousin, the wind to pick our teeth.
this desert, this life parched yet bleeding rivulets of everything i thought i was my single paged testament with little on it

whenever i see you now, this thirst quenches. but you are not liquid you are emotion the raw deep sustenance i need have always needed.

you are the elixir the sweet smell of rain

french kiss

just where the tall pines stand, pointing everywhere there lies a slight berm, and then a little pond. in autumn it is amorous with loosestrife and goldenrod, with Queen Anne’s lace growing higher here, more fertile.

and where, if you were asked a question you could answer it, if given a choice, you could make it.

i do not believe in chance. i believe whenever you smile at me you are breathing out all the warmth i need and all the sensuousness, like this place, supple in your mouth. and where, in the cool drizzle of June at the dusk of day, you kiss me

just the thought of it breaks my will.

misery in the nameless city

i am standing there, at the corner of Common and who knows what out of place out of time out of any kind of comfort zone drifting as if buoyant on a sea of desperation as the people, by the dozens, the
hundreds are muscled along by some unseen urban pump heaving in uneven rhythms, of contraction, relaxation that makes the air seem fresh and stale and honest all at the same time

i am standing here, Caucasian in an unfamiliar world watching, the comings, the goings i am visiting here, an action not entirely my own but these nameless souls in the nameless city are limping out their lives here moaning into cracked concrete, their whispers hanging listlessly over piles and piles of uncollected trash, and promises. trapped on an infected sinking ship they are as surely as the burning conjunctivitis in that infant’s eyes just now or the grey desperation on his mother’s face, on every face as they look at me, shouting
"I’m here"
“I am”

while their life, the zero sum of it gets muffled in the rusted leaky exhaust pipes of the overcrowded metro buses moving all to a pointless and unpalatable end dedicated to the men and women of VISTA (now Americorps)