Alpine

Does this maudlin paint

give me an air of vitality? of bargaining? Cheating?

On the phone all day, learning about

health insurance benefits; be simple, be easy my heart.

This, the last, dead week of the year,

where everyday feels like Sunday evening

rattles the frame of the window looking out on the canal. I

cough

the name of someone I used to love, or who loved me,

I can't really remember; last spring they found a body

in that flow

just below my window and for

week I could not sleep.

Angle my face in the mirror

just the right way, and I could be floating in grey water.

Sometimes I would sit on the balcony and play the concertina

and the woman across the canal would play her spinet.

We would keep time

with the great kick drum, tossed into the cavity under

the broken ribs of the earth

and stitched back together with our human heartbeats and this

is why every man and woman and child

has a song in them, even if they ignore it.

But we have never met each other.

The glass is cold against my cheek, the hot is on the other

side of my skull, burning outward.

Smudge on my fingers, cheek, under my eyes.

The room is cold, with the windows open, sweat still

slithers down my spine, a frozen coin down its slot.

Look at this face, lined now and still young somehow;

I'm cruelly vain, this I cannot bear.

Something, the vent or a car outside, spits my name

and I sit up, head swimming, blood sloshing,

my mouth filling with copper.

One of these Sunday evenings this week I will take a hammer and

drive a nail into my molars

and then everything will be

as it should be

like that day in 1916 when more than 800 people from all over the world

claimed to have seen Charles Chaplin at the exact same moment in the flesh.

Later, his body was stolen from its grave. How are these two

things connected? At the pharmacy, the girl showed me how to put the drops

under the tongue instead. God bless her, god bless the nurses and

the morticians.

I should pack a bag and go to see the Northern Lights

but then I think, Dying in Norway? what a queen.

All these thoughts need to be collected, is what they tell you

as the road runs out. Why can't I just

blather on into the fog and let my parents and my friends and former loves -

and current ones, if there are such -

hear what they want to hear, this is the final mercy, I think. Ambiguity.

Remember what you want, because it's all true. I am everywhere, my body is stolen.

Sure, maybe I sing to myself at times

and why should I not try a little

tenderness

after all.

My name is gone, swallowed up in the cold air.

I would stand up, go to the window, look for it.

Why would I do that? There is nothing

out there.