Cadenza

         Out of the murkiness I cry out to be heard. In the wallowing pitieousness of white plastered walls are the cursed truths that have murdered. In the one’s eyes I hear and see the only phrase that would be so audacious as to walk past mine own life. “You wouldn’t understand,” trots proudly past me and yet it does not merely trot but strike me. Stronger, sharper, and more potent than any poisonous dart that saileth on the air into the very spirit of my ravenously fragile heart. My only complaint be that this dart that strikes into my center does not consume me into the dark slumber of high dreams or noble nightmares evermore. Instead, it leaves me poisoned and half alive and unheard as Cassandra’s words sung across a sure wind. Listen! All you, humanity. Listen to what I must say. Else all things be unexisted hereafter. For if this lie not be spoken it remains a lie and nothing is real. Altogether we must diminish for what is the point of this most honorable falsehood? It is the leaf ever-changing so we may not catch it for once. The prophecy changes.

         “You would not understand,” this feeble paleness that sits in the whiteness of plaster tenors into me in frightened pity. She fears for if she is untrue then she may join me in the gowns of blue and buttons and straps. If she be true the teeth of my head will continue to rot without  smell and my hair will grow long and gray only to be lost. The poisonous dart drives deep but, I must breathe out against it. Let it slay me or let it bring me life.

“I will sing of a day when the muffins and rain were mixed for joy.

If you listen to my song perhaps you shall break from our folly.

For an entire lifetime is found in a single day

and is remembered by one.”

I hear her voice.

“Then sing to me, old one,” the paleness tenors as

I sit in that light that pours in from behind me. The plaster swirls and she begins her song, herlongest song, and her shortest song.

“The chair creaked and woozled like old bones in a young body.

My hair a down comforter

While out of the odor of muffins came blue.

Passed into the day this blue-boy went,

And he asked,

‘Shall we be friends for a day?’

A friend is forever’ says the girl.

‘But, if in a day a Mayfly marries has children and dies,

Can’t you, little nymph, be friend?,’altos the boy

‘If I were a nymph why would you only

Crave a day?’ tenors the girl

‘This is all we are given.”

         There is a selah. The paleness is joined by a quartet that lift me as venerable as the old family dog laying on a hearth. The song should be over now, it is too much to carry.

“The song is not over.”

“It is for now,” the paleness bases into the whiteness.

‘Then a day of friendship,’ the girl giggly jingles.

The woozley chair creaks one last crock

And the pair is off.

First to the bridge over torrent waters brown

Then, ride bicycles all over town.

Drizzly drizzles of stubborn rain

Shall the pair ever see the other again?

Through the forest of cars moving in lines

To the toothless man on the street who dances for dimes.

White drenched in water clings to her breasts

And laying in the green, between these two he rests.

‘is only a day what is given?’

‘a day is forever if we do not know a day.’

‘then what is after forever?’

Asks the girl to the boy between her breasts.

‘we can never know’

Says the boy.

The sun begins to sail far away leaving these two,

Yet these two will not leave, they are frozen in that green.

Finally, the man rises up and takes his lady by her hand.

Is there anything like taking your lovers’ hand?

Flesh against flesh creating heat

And that heat begun by passion,

Perhaps even love.

Swinging back and forth creating friction,

Fingers intertwined, and it is the end of self

While it is  the beginning of a new being.

The sun is now too far and forever is ending,

The orange, red, and yellow, smears across the sky.

The Mayfly will soon die

And here the boy and the girl separate.

Tears on bone as the girl watches the boy

He crosses the street and midstep turnsabout

The last look of the girl before the boy is crushed against a windsheild.

Red and blue scream and move like worms in soil,

They take the blue-boy’s carcass away

And the girl stands in the green that is covered in the dark white of

Coldness.”

The pale whiteness sings slowly, “Are we after forever?”