Vintage clothing is a young one’s game. For us, there’s too much loss. At least we can, on that, agree, without broaching the subject of forgiveness.
I’ll do you if you do me. Forgiveness is what's left when trust is gone.
Don’t do it for you, they say, do it for me! But of course, I do it for you, because I still don’t want you to be forever uncorrected.
But no amount of truth can correct you. Why not use the excuse I provided too few clues?
When even the smallest soft disclosure was too much, to you, a drive-by shooting.
I knew, they said, what I was getting into. It takes two. It takes two.
But there is only ever one.
And a black chasm where a mouth used to be.
And yet there’s all these words. They fetch themselves at the wisp of suggestion, and wait at my door for years, until it’s safe I think to check for the milk.
But there’s no implied self behind your philosophy collects. No word from the sky that gravity doesn't bury.
It was always only me. That you visit like a ghost.
Who I say nothing to. Who seems to hear every long-suppressed objection with a maddening equanimity, a querulous silence.
It’s atonement with the void. Transcendence to the lessons learned. Without the pit stop of the way I learned them.
Without any return to the circle at all.
As the flies go buzzing, warm and familiar. As the same way is in others, mannered, discreet, asking only that I see them as unique.
There still are some shirts in my closet I wore in your presence.
I still can’t resist the urge to compare the threadbare with the living cotton.
It’s a shadow I want to let go to the light. The darkness of how I let myself be sold for the putative sense I was not alone.
And now I am, as if to show me.
No scent, no feel, no evidence that it was ever more than a dream. Except that there’s this hole.
And a hole is something to savor, cultivate like strychnine, put on like cabana clothes some 50 years too late.
What’s it going to take to stop circling this drain?
The past is not some symphony that trembles and resolves. It’s an ever-changing story, where the hero always has new obstacles to surmount.
The time you did this … the time you said that … the dead called back to the present, to say they never left, and won’t be swept away.
As the soul of love, hidden in the filthiest of mildews, beckons in every attic.
It is not to be taken. It was never mine to take. It stays ‘til no one’s left to care, and it’s ready to dissolve.
A slip like Jaclyn Smith’s – for sale – at the place nostalgic threadz.
