World Keeps Turning

Cornwall again.
Without you this time.
This time, it hasn’t stopped raining,
and this time,
there’s this girl here with me.
And she’s great.
Her breath breaks on my neck,
as she laughs at some joke I make
with her head resting on my shoulder.
Her hair spills in warm red waterfalls,
and the rain washes rivers down the window pain.
The garden sighs early morning into the room,
that clean, wet green smell
mixing with her rising perfume.
Her voice is light and softly sparkling,
quickening and fierce with passion
when she speaks of things that move her,
and her kiss
is slow
and sweet with wine.

Tom Waits on the stereo,
singing a song so sad,
so wistful and nostalgic,
it could have been recorded in sepia:
he sings a song
for the lover who isn’t there.

She shivers against me.
Her smile is sleepy and her fingers gently trailing
on my back,
as we look out at the darkness lifting from the garden,
at the charcoal smudge-effect
of overcast daybreak.
She’s happy,
and she doesn’t need to know
that I’m thinking of you.

Cornwall again,
but this time,
there are more clouds
and fewer stars,
and I won’t be walking with this girl
along some perfect, empty beach,
painted quicksilver by moonlight,
at one in the morning.

It’s late.
Or early.
It’s hard to say which.
It’s blurry here,
by the rain-washed window,
with this girl in my arms and Waits on the stereo,
his voice scrubbed raw
by bourbon and his broken heart.
Blue piano.  Blue smoke,
bluer in the early blue-tinted light
of this blue morning,
with these words of endless, empty longing,
aching regret.
I’m not really here when I kiss back,
but she doesn’t notice,
or – if she notices –
doesn’t say.
A last smoke before I take her to bed.
Tom sings my song for you,
better than I ever could.
The track plays out.
Smoke up.
Window shut.
Lights off.
We go upstairs.

World keeps turning.