10.20.00 - 17:29:42

I have managed, in my usual, illimitable manner, to waste a good portion of the morning. I'm not sure where it went, or how it fled, or why.

I want to talk to someone about dreams, and not night terrors. Dreams, the sliding strange brillancies that flicker behind the starched and inexpressive smile of the woman on the street with the purple shovel as a cane, because medicare has not yet repaired her old one.

It was smooth/shiny, twisted, stout wood knotted as a grizzled old tree-spirit should be, worn to a bright, shellacked amber, the sort you'd take trekking in the Catskills, and not on the sad, dirtied streets of a sagging old industrial town.

(Now I will go finish something. After I've actually managed to finish something, I will return to you. Oddly enough, you will not know I was gone.

Also an aside, I have another chair now, in my office, by the window through which the lost ladybugs fly, where they crawl, golden-red and hopeful, hopeless.

Hopelessness. Sometimes I know what that tastes like, salten ash, ashen salt.

Sometimes I know.)

Much later now, and the window I opened this morning to feel the cool breath of chilled mist against my skin now sweeps with a breath that is almost hot, for the season. Why does the season shift, then, and leave me longing for whatever has gone. I would like to spend a month with the dying October forest, until my eyes have swallowed so much rusted color that I would dream me drowning in sunset.

Maybe then, maybe then, the paucity of time, and season, would seem less to me, the small moments richer, and so rarely fading. I would like to step between seconds, into some eternal stretch of timelessness where I could wander where I will - unchanging. I would steal someone's french fry from her hand, and stretch out on a weeping willow's bank, beneath the unshifting heated light of the sun. I would sleep until I was no longer tired, and rise and drift in this little salt crystal of preserved time.

Maybe I would walk the world round, a hundred times, and finally step back into my thin-sloughing-skin of passing time only after alone I had loved and lost a hundred times, and passed beyond the bounds of the touch, and razored the stilled blue sky, and slept upon the broken spine of the world, and known every inch of soil as intimately as I know the slatted light that falls through the blinds onto my office wall - singularly, unconsciously, unaffectedly.

Maybe I would return, then, and no one would notice the deepening echo in my eyes, some sapphire promise that only sailors know. Maybe I would return, then, and no one else would see the rubies in my hair.