Over the Rainbow

I always imagine her small. She sells herself that way. In cut off thoughts and broken epiphanies. That truncate her presence. Her moments are grave and hot. Ripe with hysterics. Yet not quite real. As she stumbles over the moments of grace.

I remember her tiny. A distant pinhole of light at the far end of long dark sleep. Always moving away.

The moon through a rear windshield. As where we've been gradually dissipates. Bubbles fading in a glass of champagne. The chasing ghosts absent from the musty attics in which we snuck out our games. It's always small. No matter how great the distance. The moon is always behind. The attic always ahead. Those rickety stairs all that unites us in our unreal escape. Some blind destination. On an journey just as sightless.

He was stubborn and cavalier and quick to soften. He spoke in the dialogue of an engineer. though he was anything but. Flirting with the math in indiscriminate liaisons. Seducing its whores with a payment of another sort. Blocking his life as a tower builds the child. Up and out. Until unsteady is all that is left.

The collapse is a relief. As the bed creaks with the muddied dreams of accepting strangers. Echoing stairwells heave with the whelp of slaves.

He waits for wolf in his tattered nightgown. She pauses to hear the moan of the moon as it carves through the belly of the heavens. Their deafness not yet within their grasp. They move their lips to speak. Yet no words are shared.

They search the levels. Trusting the breadcrumbs time has left. Prowling the moist grass for things more dead. Following the road. Home an oblique derivative of broken skin.

Tugging on the curtain. Trying to remember. That behind it there is only just an ordinary man.