I'm calling this one done.

LIZA

A wilting white sun bleeds out all his heat over the tranquil black deep

While the moon grins through a cloud, cold and clear, dimpling from ear to ear,

And white crests rise on the smoke colored waters under a slate dark pier.

There Liza sings about drinking Prosecco,

And Liza's voice in the dark leaves an echo;

As her own song sings her to sleep.

Glutted to burst on the sun's dying sighs and dancing like midnight vampires

The moon and the sea spin in lustful distrust, darting drunkenly over the shore.

Their awful push-pull on a lantern (half-full) spreads a horror around like a whore.

While Liza lies with her head next to mine

And Liza's breath keeps the rhythm in time

With my own and the sea's and the fire's.

There's the soft susurrus of lovers like us rustling far off in a rush;

The moon shuts her eyes and feigns to disguise that she chokes on the smoke in a spire

The moon's crying eyes deride and disguise red watery smoke floating higher,

Then Liza bites her lip at the window

And Liza sighs and sits: limbs akimbo

As her own voice laughs in a hush.

He won't come; he won't come! In a fury she hums with her head in a hot-hungry-haze. 

I watch as she stands with her hope in her hands to see smoke spilling into the air

A rat-tat-tat boom! and the pier lights the gloom as she screams her poor sailor’s despair.

My Liza claps and clutches the window

And Liza smiles to weep as a widow

While dark smoke blackens her gaze.

We'll be free; we'll be free! Now it's just you and me til the day you betray me just once.

I smile and recline while inferno flames climb over the mounting hot pyre

One kick and my Liza, my murderous doll, falls fast toward the flames of her fire.

And sweet Liza's screams echo out, 

My Liza's last ear-splitting shout:

A remembrance of lovelier stunts.

The shimmering seawater surges straight up in a blast of sulfurous fury.

The sky’s many eyes blink in surprise as the air sets fire to her hair

And I watch then as Liza, my beautiful darling, vanishes into the air.

Smoke ushers an end to disguise

And spreads Liza's final goodbyes
Just the moon: my judge and my jury.

The Apartment

She began to wake when the rumble of the engine disappeared, subtracting the white noise that had lulled her. The taxi driver was already pulling her bags from the trunk, causing her to scurry all of a sudden to gather her handbag and wallet. Once the cab pulled away, Jessica was left standing outside a moderately tall building with a crumbling facade that vaguely harkened to the regality of the nation's earliest days.

The trouble, as she stood on the too-quiet street surrounded by her smart set of matching luggage, gathering glances from men who loitered to smoke in doorways before and behind her, was that Jess had absolutely no idea of how to move from that spot. There was too much for her to carry in too unfamiliar a place.

She was on the verge of panicked tears when the building's door opened and two young men walked out into the heavy, damp wind. They stopped in front of her, assessing her and her trousseau.

"You going in there?" the taller one asked.

Muddled with apprehension, she took a moment to scan the pollution-stained building, the dented sign on the corner, the address on the torn awning behind the guy's head. Everything pointed to her being at the right address, but she couldn't convince herself now that she was in right place. Still, she'd come this far, and the wind kept slapping her coat collar into her face, so she nodded.

"Want help?" he asked.

This time she nodded without a pause.

The tall man thrust his right hand at her, "Chris, 3C."

"Oh," her hand in his, her feeling of shame at her helplessness, and her new uncertainty about her plans made her oddly shy. "Oh, um, Jessica, 5J."

He smiled. She hadn't let go of his hand. "Damn," he said cheerfully, "I was hoping to avoid the stairs." He pulled his hand free and, with smile still in place, he hefted the garment bag over his shoulder and grabbed the largest suitcase in his right hand. That left the rolling case, overnight bag, and the small case she already clutched next to her purse. The other man grabbed the overnight bag, settled it atop the roller, and pulled a key from his pocket. He used some complicated maneuver to jar the door open then he held it wide.

Chris, 3C, stood near the door, laden with the bags so heavy that Jess hadn't been able to lift them herself at the airport. She stared at him a moment before realizing he was waiting for her. "Ladies first," was implied in the smirk on his face. At that moment, at that smirk, Jessica suddenly saw how uncommonly handsome he was.

She went in. The smell hit her immediately and she halted, nearly causing the two men to tumble in the foyer. The dazzled smile fell from her face. The odors of a dozen decades of cooking, of wretched humanity, of sex, of questionable plumbing, assaulted her. Chris pushed in behind her so the other guy could follow.

"You get used to it." Chris's chin pointed toward the right, "Stairs over there."

She paused yet again. "But where's the elevator?"

The guy with the rolling bag snorted. Chris shouldered past her and shoved the stairway door open with an elbow.

She scurried behind him, afraid to be left alone in the fetid vestibule.

The staircase was narrow and steep. She watched the men ahead of her take the steps two at a time. Her shorter legs and unfamiliarity with close, stuffy staircases left her lagging behind.

The men waited for Jessica to produce the key. She'd received it in a padded envelope the week before when she was still in her parents' home, enjoying her vision of the wild city full of promise and of her mission to live like "regular people." This fantasy was romanticized, and when she opened the door to the furnished flat she'd rented sight-unseen, she realized just how unromantic the reality might turn out to be.

Guess the title of this new poem in a COMMENT.

Warm now.

At first it scalded

Satisfied a deep need.

The burn felt good—

A remembrance of life,

A promise of excitement

And energy,

Until that ambience died

OR WAS DISAPPEARED.

Greedy mouths turn it tepid,

Bitter and dissatisfying

In too short a time.

Still, trapped in its own

Memory, the lingering idea

Of comfort and wonder,

Cling on until the last drop

Turns to ash.

Cold now.

Maintenance

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Of Time and Faking It

     Filmmakers are able to capture and convey the illusion of a heart-stopping moment. They can make time stand still by precise placement of light and echo of sound. But you can only appreciate the genius of the scene if you've experienced it in real life and you have some basis for judging the realism of the acting, direction, cinematography, and sound.

     There are, as well, rare moments when the relativity of time is so vivid in real life that one feels that it could be swatted out of the way or dragged into focus with the right amount of concentration. Certain aspects of one’s environment slow down; others blur. Still other things fade out altogether like light left behind by a speeding spacecraft.

     By Sunday, I felt weary from long days of lingering rain and cool air. Heavy fog snuck in my open window and tumbled into bed with me while the sun clawed its way over the horizon. A few optimistic songbirds cheered the rising light, but blanketing clouds and sharp pellets of spring mist soon scattered both the sun and sound. Another day arrived amidst the whispers of wetted leaves.

     The morning fell away, quick and heavy, like wet cardboard left beneath an open window. I felt the tacky, damp uncomfortable scraps of soggy air, and my shoulders shuddered to slough the feeling off as duty set my pace.

     I swallowed pills for my breakfast before heading out in hope that some small sliver of the uninvited feelings might be waylaid and distracted if I could only clear or cloud my mind. I used drugs as a coward uses a blindfold before the firing squad.

     The odd thing about relativity is that it also offers safe harbor.

     I settled into a bizarre routine that day. I felt detached from my surroundings: detached from the ground I walked on, detached from my own skin. And though I was still compelled to greet the same people on the street that I always greeted, half of them looked through me. The other half was yet again divided between those who smiled and said hello (as ever) and those who scowled.

     Throughout, my mind revolved around an ache in my chest while my ears echoed with all my unsaid words, all my unshed scales. I’d hardly ate or paused or slept from the swirl in my brain, but through pain came clarity. I would take it as a lens through which to henceforth examine my life.

     Thus I went about my business examining each action, habit, and process and pushed myself to wonder if I were faking it. Was I faking my way through scant and skimpy meals, through roughshod work, through each very ordinary conversation that punctuated the hours? Did I genuinely care about the health of every person that I how-do-you-do’d? Did that even really matter?

     When I got home again, exhausted, I slept all the rest of the afternoon. Early in the evening, before twilight, I woke heavy and sluggish and absolutely ravenous. I lay suspended outside of time and place for several moments as each sense processed the world around me. The smell of damp air and the familiar musty mattress, the sound of chickadees chasing each other around the feeder- spreading seed on the ground for squirrels to enjoy - and the aches of a weary body too long at rest: stiff neck, slow knees, and a dull need to pee. I felt my sticky tongue drag against my lips as I rolled over onto my back and scratched my stomach.

     Moments later, before I knew I had decided to get up, I found myself in the bathroom with one long narrow window high up on the wall. Through it I could count the tarrying clouds on a single hand. All the pinks and reds and oranges lit them up like neon petals floating across the sky. The light dimmed as evening gathered her skirts for a sweeping exit over the edge of the horizon, ducking out to offer me privacy and stillness.

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Dr. E's Last Stand

The doc turned out to be a bent-over antique of a man with a tidy moustache and pungent aftershave.

Dr. E was about eighty.

I asked if he needed to see a chiropractor because, I swear, his torso was bent at 45 degrees as he shuffled around.

But man, was he cool.

He had that wisdom bred from keen intelligence piled with decades of human experience.

“Back in my real life,” he told me, “I was a cardiologist. I never intended to retire.”

He left it hanging there for me to draw my own conclusion that a man bent at a 45 degree angle wasn’t fit to perform cardio-thoracic surgery for obvious reasons.

He said he’d fallen off a roof fourteen years ago, and his vertebrae from the middle of his back downward were fused together.

No chiropractic work would fix that.

But undaunted by this crippling tragedy, he found a place for himself assessing the general health of patients sent to this little psych hospital.

You didn’t just show up and check in, you had to be admitted. So that was Dr. E’s place now. He worked in the middle of the night in the middle of the week at M---, assessing the craziness of all manner of crazies.

I liked him, liked talking to him. He spoke about “the dark ages when they piped in sunlight” to the lecture halls when he was in med-school. We may have exchanged a comment about Gunsmoke; his moustache was reminiscent of Doc Adams, but his bald head was all Montgomery Burns.

He asked questions to determine the status of my vision, hearing, and olfactory senses:  “Keep your eyes on this.” He moved his pen around my face, back and forth, left and right, up and down. “Can you hear me?” he whispered. “Can you smell my aftershave?”

He asked if I knew who I am and where I was.

“My name is—“

“You don’t have to prove it to me,” he smiled. “Just say yes or no.”

He didn’t hit my knee with a hammer to check my reflexes, but he took out his hearing aids from both ears to put his stethoscope there instead. It was electronic, to amplify the sound, I guessed, to compensate for his poor hearing.

I watched him turn the dial at the joint where the ear thingies were held to the cold thingie.

His face was earnest and wizened as he listened to my heart. I could tell he took hearts seriously. He listened like he was experiencing an echo of Mozart himself at a piano.

That wet thud sploosh of muscle squeezing blood was his music-- his drug, even.

He’d dedicated years of study and a lifetime of experience to this organ that he could no longer touch, no longer hear with his own ears. He had to settle for brief, electronically enhanced refrains of that golden time, in between asking lunatics if they could smell him.

Poor old Dr. E.

I felt so much more comfortable talking to him than I felt the next morning with the psychiatrist.