You Are Men Of Stones

it started with the four.
moving between cars
as the train moved between
boroughs, counties, islands.
and as we hit the light
of the brief aboveground
the music it did play.

spins, flips, drops, dance moves i'll never do, they did on a moving train and in close quarters. deft maneuvers inches from commuters they dared to ignore them. and as we slipped back beneath the same city yet always the other - or i suppose the original depending on how one perceives it - they moved on. and just like that... it was over.

and then it was hours spent selling happiness in the place i never feel good enough for but never feels up to my standards, and then, as always, it was over. those last hours always seeming so terribly long and so terribly quick, spent with that mysterious thin film on skin, that drunkish feeling in head and limbs, that same desire to stay and fix what i've forgotten, to get the hell out. but just before the final curtain fell with bike lock on front door... is that? i think... well he and his wife certainly look happier than they did after that prostitution thing came out. but ultimately i leave with that unbalanced feeling that comes with an unbalanced till: four dollars over after ten dollars short is almost too much to take. it's like i tell mike: i feel like i'm losing my mind... i haven't been getting much sleep.

but fuck it. i got a train to catch.

and do i how i do. just before doors closing and i'm settled in, eating cookies too broken to actually sell. a substitute dinner akin to the breakfasts i used to make from the day old tray precariously balanced on bakery machines.

and just after making it back to my own island, my county, my borough, my home, he steps through the door asking for change, for dinner, for attention. and then the latter he demands though in not so many words: "from the halls of montezu-uma, to the shores of tripoli," somehow sliding his way into america the beautiful with such skill clearly not available to his ability to hit the notes he's aiming for, into that song which i can never hear without being reminded of sinatra emoting his own version in his later years. the tired sinatra, the sinatra that still somehow had it, the sinatra who had a cold.
and then...
the transfer.
not running not walking senses shifting somehow alert flowing with the crowd to the other stair that leads me to my own train on the wrong track a new route and just making it just barely to find out we're skipping stops we're expressing past all those i never care for anyway this train is goin' places and then finally...

a stop.

a next stop announced, but at this point... how can i trust it? i get off and walk the long way turning onto streets that seem vaguely safer, somehow smarter, some kind of a more full. but as i cut across the rare two-way street in the dead traffic night i see it in front of me and the first thought i have: is it breathing? and i watch and i wait but i don't stop walking. and there is no breath. there is no panting, there is no up down up down of a body being guided by lung.

the dog is dead.

i don't stop. somehow i am capable of instantly realizing the possibility of death, capable of checking for the signs without a slowing of step, and yet something in me that will do something after the fact is gone. it's simply not there.

howl, howl, howl, howl! o, you are men of stones:
had I your tongues and eyes, i'd use them so
that heaven's vault should crack. she's gone for ever!
i know when one is dead, and when one lives;
she's dead as earth. lend me a looking-glass;
if that her breath will mist or stain the stone,
why, then she lives.

and yet i know,
now she is gone forever

...

i come home to another, very much alive other, signaling it's intensity through shrill yaps and yelps that have kept me up for nights on end. i come home to bugs and heat and hunger not satiated by leftover sweets. but i come home. home to last cigarettes and a glass or two of gin. home to a shadily rented apartment where i am no more permanent than the occasional breeze - blow winds and crack your cheeks? i should be so lucky - but i am home.

come home, come home
ye who are weary come home
calling, o sinner
yes, i am come home