Unkempt Memories

And that’s how you close the door
The wind takes over for you,

It’s the smoke trail that leads to a year you remember a little vaguely, the wind that does the talking for you – and you hear the words once again,

the smiles are little faded,
the eyes have grown numb,
the hair at the end of the temples,
the skin beside the lips is layered,
the voices aren’t the same – the many dead, the few wounded and the scattered sentences are blue

In the smoke, in the cigarette-drag the musician sucks deeply, in the bar that’s a shade of pink and black, where the women pass between the chairs and the men are swimming in glasses with wings and tables loaded with entrails,

The smoke winds between the sheets of the music, the song is thick as a cloud on the ceiling, the heaviness on the walls, the patches beside the carpet keep moving,

their shapes are the many islands on your mind,
the faces you lost, callused bits you washed into the drain,
but the soap-stains, the shadows and their sweet rot on the walls remain,
The singer is all shining steel and pearly neck, her mouth is an ancient cave leading deeper and deeper, into the home, the park by the school, its winter here – the lamps are French-kissing the fog, the bench is full of tramps, harlots, peanut dust and tea-cups,

You are walking again in that red dress, it could be a flash of lightening in human-form, it could be a fingerprint from a dream that came before I did,
you are as the dying sun and the half-birthed moon, a moon from the another night, when they played the song for the first time, you circle my limbs and when we reach the tree, I kiss you breathlessly – you seem to climb into my head, like you found the room where you’d left a piece behind,
when we return to the shed it’s the dark that surrounds us and a primeval longing fills the floor of the world – we know we are on our astral ways before the restaurant’s offer succor,

The room is wet, the four posters are crumbling, the ceiling is cob-webbed, the light is amber – and it’s the color of a beautiful sadness – a mist that never stop churning, its taste is mint and mud on your cheeks, its water a wine that's grainy and a filthy red,

I bathe with you in the sadness, the bathtub runs and runs, it could crash as we smoke and peel ringlets from our faces – our skin is virgin and unpeeled, there is a sky stuck like glue on our bodies, undead and fresh for centuries, we go onto light another candle for the ones who didn’t make it –
it could be a hotel where the burnt stories are put to bed and room service brings a velvet robe,

it could be your room when you were 16 and I am neatly lying in the letters, it could be a road drying out to infinity where we pass under a million stars bleeding from the universe,

the way the highway bends I know there’s space at our fingertips
For another drink and another song,
And that’s how the door closes.