Filed under: Poetry
Technology seems so abrupt in its obtrusive luminance, as she reads Kerouac in a corner cafe, to lingered strands of Spanish guitar. Communicating over cross-aged times, she watches the pages of her book, as they flutter to the floor, giving away cracked bindings. And she is curled as small as science would allow, deep in the belly of a worn leather armchair.
She is seeing herself in Montparnasse, avoiding the gaze of men like Kerouac, who is busy catching the eye of a hooked nosed Arab girl. In Gare-St.-Lazare. Pledging to be Parisian during this Summer of Love, she enlists the likeminded intention of her Montreal amie, arriving in May. Spurning the Quebecois – they will be authentic.
The words blur on the page of nearly pageless chapbook, as images of night obscure the present day. Images of a boy, splayed across the bed, and dripping, lithe and liquid down the sides, like the walls of her resolve. Nibbling gingerly on the pen’s end she ponders horizons of emotion. Perhaps there are certain things you only learn in stasis. She is being held hostage by her independence.
“She sounds like she’s going to be a lot of headfucking and not very much of the other kind.” – her cynicism is much appreciated, along long distance lines.
Fumbling among buttons and jagged teeth – everybody wants something for nothing. Something for the unknowns.
She props herself up on one elbow, looks into his face but he is giving nothing away. Staccato beats of waylaid hearts and the incessant slip of “I don’t know yous” beneath the hazed layers of a flooded mind. Adrown in questions sifting through the sheets in search of something more familiar than mere motion.
Netted glances – oh what am I to you, tell me to myself. We know so little and we know little love, only the plays of unfettered seduction. No longer lay lurking, we are clear in our intention. He slips an arm around her waist as she plays to dreams, but he has nightmares in her bed.
“Perhaps it’s the low ceilings.”
She is claustrophobic in this room thick with things unsaid, and left speechless in wake. But at least there are the gentle cracks of breaking light to remind each of the ease that outside offers. Until, however, there is only the revelation of face and hands, which darkness left obscured.
He is lightly skinned and softer in slanted day. She calls the covers up beneath her arms, revealing a long line of back like they do in the movies, though she is ever uneasy, anticipating and mispredicting their next moves. Pulling his sweater over his head he is no longer bare chested – he gazes at remnants of herself, pieced across grey walls and remains silent, slowly stepping and backbending back over the bed in a fallen bridge.
“What are you thinking?” she asks, falsely playful.
“I’m thinking about my nightmares.”
She is abashed, and in thoughtful retrospect wishes she had pried, though instead she remains splayed on the surface in a state of anticipated rejection – skirting the current. Fear has swelled her tongue, lost loves choking back her words.
He kisses her on the forehead, the tenderest of places, reserved for the Lost Boys.
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