Catwalk.

It is the month of November. In it, the cold air of morning cracks at your jaw. The glamour of picking up after a dog next to a schoolyard is helped by a group of little girls with painted moustaches, who lean against the fence and agree among themselves, "That's some fine looking fresh poo, right there."

It is the month of November. In it, the late night bites at your neck while the rest of the city sleeps. A woman with a leopard print fur coat appears, smoking outside her stairwell as you pass. You each say a brief hello. But when she looks down at the dog, she greets him with the slow syrup of seduction. "Hello, gorgeous."

Bloomsday.

The sixteenth of June. That is how I know you best. L. What steps were those that fell. What are steps? Marking some steep precipice, edging toward, or against, or away from arrival. I never told you this, but I think of you as the streets of Ulysses. I never told you because, still, I can not decide whether I am walking your streets, or whether you are walking mine. Leopold Bloom. L. Some stringy metaphor, but one of metonymy, a book that spells out some epic, some daily epic, where each day awake requires a return, one to recall, to relearn existence. And I know your each return. I know when you walk my streets, because you make a different sound on the sidewalk. In the forever of an epic, we walk towards each other. Our steps are wrapped about the legs of one another, their course of bones, their coarse surface. And I know you know other streets. I know how you know them, how you have enveloped them into your habitus. And I think you know that how you live, while that body lives, you will always bear the marks of my mouth, my print, my footsteps. My writing. Our city.

The everyday bursts. It leaks, honey, the wet melancholy of truth. Every day a return. It turns upon your every day. Each is a day of birth, and in each a rebirth of myth that shapes the arches of every step, heaving against the bones of what is knowable. That piece of knowledge is laid out on velvet cloth. Parcels to weight the clock of each day. And each day, the sixteenth of June.

You fit into me / like a hook into an eye

Gestures and words and postures can be lines that ring a truth, spun close with care or too loose with less. But beneath them all may be a truth that snags onto your sinews and floods your hollows. We replace it with talk, though while all those lines are cast about they furnish a case, preparing for its demand to be unbound. I held one, some few nights ago. I felt a slow truth rushing into my corners. It was a warm hand pushing through a window. A truth, one of myself brought by another, or no, of another that brought me myself, or both. Truth, sewn from desire. One that slips along another's movements, their bend, the curve of their thoughts, the life beneath their voice.

Strange, that desire reveals our truths and, once revealed, enhances that desire. Its needle makes a puncture in our geography. And, once there, it is all you draw from. So much that, when another makes their turn towards, the moment explodes in you and the world freezes, hot about your neck. That unbound moment comes when they look at you, if they look at you, their eyes open on you. Black caves to crawl, with flecked mountains of glossed brown mapping towards their center. But only when, if, they are looking at you. I had some thing to show, but the eyes were not there. Under a lamp there was only dark hair and a light shoulder. Some few nights ago I sat outside a moment that was not mine, hooked to what I was unfit to climb. The truth held around a corner, and I only spoke days later, but only to myself as I circled through the cloud left in my house. In our pooling quiet, we plunge closest. Words circle a well.

a fish hook / an open eye

Words circle a well.

This man sat low inside the doorway and leaned against the glass wall. There are strange panes. Those windows that span a whole story, a kind of nothingness that somehow holds against the weight. I was walking past him to the bank machine. Next to him was a beaten cane and an open sack, packed with things I could not see, but atop them was a half-eaten slice of pizza on a greased paper plate. I nodded, and he looked out the doorway, and on my way out I nodded again.

"Cold out there," he said. "I'm not going out there. Hell, I'm waiting for the bus, I've been waiting for an hour, hour, hour and a half. You seen the bus?"

This city seems to run only a few buses in the night, with less people wanting to move around.

"I can't walk in this. This city wants me to die, but I won't. Ah, I don't know, this city is always making me wait. I've been pushed right out of here. First it was all these Indians, and now there's rich people everywhere tearing everything down and telling me it's not mine.

He coughed, the sound of a long, snaking string being hurled from his lungs.

"Me and my sister, you know, we own half of this city. We used to own everything from here up to the railroad, the station, and then north. That's all ours, and they're all acting like it isn't. And we're going to get it back. She's got kids now, and the kids are going to get it back for us too. I've been waiting years now."

He swore and muttered. I told him I hoped his bus would come soon.

The excitation is due.

Finally, she had that dream where her teeth fall out. Standing in a courtyard, a square block of sun burning white bricks whiter. She was waiting for something to arrive, staring past the courtyard to the drive. And to the sound of fountain water falling, her hands shook and her teeth wobbled out, their fall and tick on the bricks drowned out by the endless patter of drops in the pool.

Her face fell off. And what she was waiting for arrived then, a dark car with black windows. The sun slick on its paint and drooling over its doors as they closed behind a pair of shoes. Her clothed knees burned against the brick as she tried to peck her teeth, and her fingernails scraped and nicked in the cracks. But there were too many for her to hold.

When she woke, the soft of her jaw against the bed held clenched and hard. She loosed it for her daylight. Though, "I had that dream again," she said after the next. Teeth falling out and hanging loose. Her face fell off, and she wanted to know, did she feel it anymore?

Ananas.

Floral offerings like competing sacrifices.

Crates and boxes tumbled out my closets. I have carried them with me to all the houses I lived in, through every move. Thinking that I need them, though before now they were never looked at until the next time they needed to be picked up with a grunt and carried into a moving van towards the next place they would be stored.

I was going to be moving again soon, and wanted to clean these old boxes out. I opened one of them and found it full of things that have been given to me: letters and notes and poems and stories, some of them at least ten years old. And others more recent, all sharing a space, cramping, boxed into corners. They were the last, folded signs of old kinds of relationships with people I no longer knew. But among them were a few of my own sealed envelopes. Some things I wrote for my prom date. No one cares, or at least no one should care, about their prom when years have passed beyond it. Still, I remember running into an old high school friend some while ago and swallowing my astonishment as the topic arose. But now it was right here. For my date, for my teenage illusions, I had written a dozen poems and sealed them into separate envelopes.

A few months before prom, my Oma died, and I needed a suit for her funeral. I never had one before, and it made more sense, with the little money my family had, to purchase a suit that I could wear to both her funeral and then to my prom. It was grey, and was ill-fitting and untailored. When I put the suit on for the second time before the dance, and put the envelopes into my jacket pocket, there was still the pamphlet for my Oma's funeral service.

Now the remaining envelopes were here, in this open box on my couch. There were three left. The last three, and I knew because I had written the numbers in small, on the corners so that I would have been able to remind myself which order I should offer them to my date. The envelopes were still sealed. The old glue was a difficult lock. I wanted them in order now, too.

Ten:

"One rose,
...
...
..."

I turned the little card over, and on the back of the note was a stamp to advertise the florist counter at the grocery store where I worked. I remembered now the hasty thought of that romance, where in the produce section I felt a need for some great gesture, but lacked. So I took the stack of cards from the florist when the clerk went on his smoke break.

Eleven:

"One rose,
...
...
..."

This one also had the stamp. And my crooked penmanship, with fast, tilting letters.

Twelve, and I could hardly bear the reflection of myself that burst from the envelopes as I opened them:

"One rose,
...
...
..."

What dreamy youth. I remember giving the first three. One when I knocked at her door, the second after dinner, and the third when we arrived at the dance. My date lived in another city, she went to a different school. At her house, she opened the door in a bright pink dress that she made. Her hands were dry. We went to dinner, where she told me she had already eaten, and she had a cup of tea while I ate alone. At the dance, in the gym of my small town high school, she looked around quietly, squinting.

After she read each card, she said thank you and tucked them into her purse without looking at me.

The next six envelopes were thrown out of my car window when my date fell asleep after she asked to leave early. I remember my slow anger. Despite the cobbled effort, plucking cards from the florist at the grocery store where I worked and shoplifting a dozen roses, I aspired towards valiance. The great failure was to try so hard, though feebly--or to think that I was--and for an empty cup. But another was to to dream all this into expectancy.

Things end early. After, I threw the flowers out the window, except one to take home with me. Before that, I sat at a bonfire in my friend's backyard in my suit, the one which served for both a funeral and a prom, and I blew the flame off some marshmallows. Friends laughed about their night over sugary vodka drinks, and I stewed against valiance, as if I would never do it all over again, until I did, elsewhere, but for others. Now, finally and with recall, I laid those last three cards into my fireplace.

Things without the matter.

"You two guys better watch out."

Barb and her friend approached as we entered the room. The museum exhibition was held in a long hall upstairs, and a band was performing at the opposite end while everyone listened or mingled or stood quietly near a window with a glass in their hand. There were tables of wine, and others with platters of cheese and grapes and vegetables. Barb had on a series of gold jewelry and was dressed in dark red, and she balanced her wine while pinning her clutch under her arm. She stepped towards me and took my hand.

"You two," Barb said to me, "but you, you just better watch it. You're the best looking ones in the room. Look at you, my goodness." And she laughed, a way that seemed as though she was laughing at herself. "You're so tall and sharp. I'm here, and I just needed to tell you. My friend and I, we saw you come in and we wanted you to know, you just watch." Barb was standing close now and put her hand on my coat. Her friend was aside, waiting with two glasses of wine. Barb took another sip of hers and tapped one of her gold rings against the rim of her glass. She laughed again.

"It's okay," she said, retaking my hand and and gently shaking it. "I've been married for thirty-seven years, it's okay, so, you know. My husband is sitting right over there. We're out here. I want you to have a great night. Yes, it's nice to meet you too." And as she left, Barb laughed. "My goodness."

Anything that had also fallen.

Once off the phone, he took a slow stand and then took his coat from the rack. He crossed the street. There was an empty lot now where there had once been a long building, one with a purpose that stood for decades, perhaps a hundred years. The lot was marked by the crumbled rocks of ruin. And bits of garbage blown through the sagging fence, to where he had placed a chair in its middle. The chair was stiff and dark, its feet rigid in the broken stones. It was a free arena for thought, though not zoned by the city. When he would walk past though, he would never see anyone else using the lot the way he did, and was likely the only person ever to sit there now. He sat down and looked at the toes of his shoes, dusted by steps through what were once lit halls and tall rooms.

He remembered someone he knows telling him that anger is a thing, maybe the only feeling, which does not go away on its own. A real work is required, some deep dialectic, else it stays. When it stays, it is a mass of untidy burrs that snag all corners. It will catch on skin, and then on all that is touched.

And he held some old anger. When he sat there, it seethed against the ruins. The stones glazed and froze in their place. The scrape of his boots churned the dust to glass. He didn't know it, his want in this coming to repair into ruins. He imagined chariots of camels and horsemen. Sitting quiet in the midst, this ancient thing cast a hot blanket over the tumbled old bricks. Anger looks like a shout, but it feels silent, white. The chair creaked as he rose. He crossed back over the street and hung his coat.