What was her name?
**** I can’t remember.
It was a boy’s name
made feminine
with a little “i” at the end
like maybe hearing it would
make you think of
some fat guy making pizzas
until you see it
spelled out or
until it becomes attached
to her lips and hair and
skin.
The “i” was not dotted
with a little heart,
(not her style at all) but
I should have a picture
in a box some where with more pictures.
I don’t.
I’ve got little notes,
tiny thoughts scribbled
on empty match book covers,
on the backs of
pretentious
business cards,
in the borders of
the mutilated,
amputated flesh
of decrepit
used up yellow pages,
ripped from a dead and
disjointed phone book.
I woke up from this dream
and groped for something
to scrawl on,
anything,
because it seemed significant
at 2:38 am.
In the desert somewhere,
(I’ve never even been)
you were
looking out the window
and the way the parched
dry light crackled
around you
you might have been an angel
or a sign
partially occluded by glass
advertising something
I could never afford
like family or god
when suddenly you were not
a silhouette,
not back lit,
but glowing.
You were so in love, with
who I don’t know, and you
went into free fall
back
onto the bed
pulled your knees up
to your chest and
kicked your legs giggling.
I was part dead, half ghost
and still happy that you
were so happy.
I said, “you’re pregnant?”
knowing the way you
know things without
really having a way
of knowing
in a dream.
You laughed again
grabbed your little dog up
in your arms,
(I’ve no idea where the pup
came from), and baby-whispered,
“You’re going to cut
the umbilical,
aren’t you?”
and I woke with
the image of that mongrel
chewing through
the cord.
I am
waiting at the pharmacy
and the…
technician,
is reading the
cryptic symbols
penned in
indiscernible Latin,
my prescription.
She is not beautiful
but very fuckable
And in my mind
I am constructing an
image of her ******
likening
the shape,
size, color, etc.,
to her mouth,
when I see
my own writing on
the back
through her precise
fingers.
The tech,
she is holding a
snapshot of her.
It might as well be
a picture of me
vomiting or
************ or
defecating.
This
is what I have left,
my version of a photo,
my dream,
scrawled on the back
of my medicine.
**** getting better.
I ****** it from her hand.
I leave fast. I will
never go back.
This is no chemical imbalance.
This is not my inheritance.
The loss and pain, sometimes,
that's the pill we need to swallow.