Equations
in the sand

Laid out
and toweling off

Curvatures to
algebraic form

They define her lines
shape her axis

My island of
expectation

Amid summer's long
subterfuge

A billiard table imprints its damp shadow
on a yellow wooden floor. The game still
unbegun, mere fragment of the sorrow
felt by the patrons whose wilted heads will
still be here tomorrow, if tomorrow comes.
Red walls distended by burning lamps
and burned out hearts beating blood through ear drums:
Reverie to the night god /   Dreaming tramps
drowning in their heads in lakes of absinthe
color of the ceiling better than being
awake but indefinitely absent.
The lamps blink, eyes floating, speak all-seeing:
Vincent, let us meet before you entreat
the crows out of your head into the wheat.

night wears a skin
of cold velvet
stippled with pores
through which illumination
prickles as the intergalactic whiskers
of Schrodinger's cat
catching the scent of gravity

it was an era of candlelit dreams
     we played my piano
     harmonizing the evening's laughter
     transfixed by starlight
     and peppered with too much youth
     to catch the fallen minutes
     drifting as snowflakes
     between our words

        its remnants still leave a taste
        of Parisian nights on the rim
        of my glass - how you toasted
        every hour as the sun bled into
        the Seine and our blush faded
        to overcast with upturned lapels
        and footsteps receding into nightfall

Remember black winds of November nights,
rattle your bones, chill your marrow,
quiver time's arrow and rip the world's white
veil from a skeletal face. Throw
it. Watch it fold, caught on the cathedral,
high church of the ossified faithful,
whose whispered prayers will calcify us all.
Unveiled, the world is bones without a soul,
rattling as it grinds, creaking as it turns.
A flag flies / Calcium collects in urns.