September.

September found me rankling,
intemperate
somehow both closer and farther
from you,
Old things fading, always extrinsic,
external,

Like the garrulous middle age women at the far table
Trading stories and whiffs of perfume
Over bottles of half-filled California Chardonnay and yellowed martinis.

I remember the bartender, the bathroom, and the wine list
Landmarks as if I was going to tell you how to get there
Find it, in time
Like you could.
My eyes, aqualine, seeing the world in a crystalline
state.

(“It was nothing,” the crumpling woman whispers out from the cloak of her hood.)
The old man turns uneasy,
stepping tremulously up the creaking stairs.

Do we feel pity then?
Store it for some time later, when we can accept our own disbelief.
While the worn, decrepit face with knees looks behind his lanky shadow, cautiously, at the landing,
Wondering, for a moment, where he came from.

The number 9 in his divine memory, as he looks for a button in an elevator, some new way out...

(Did we once have a sanctuary so divine ?)

In the last moment, the one before the turn, the fear is something palpable
Is it us seeing him or him seeing us?

Or the silence,
only moving on to more of itself.

We do not exist in relation to anything but ourselves.
Another’s maudlin apparatus so grievously unattached
to anything human in ourselves.
His next theory will be so overstated
It will merely prove its fallacy on the tip of a flaccid tongue
While you watch the forecasted glory of your species dwindle into the flecks
of well projected spittle
from another's open mouth.

But remember this
it is always up to the audience as to who is trying to make more of themselves.

As the 9 women
their bobbing pigeon heads
their pointedly pointed fingers
And the crystalline specter, I saw, in youth, with liquid eyes.