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.