ghosts

There is a way
if we want
into everything
I’ll eat the chicken carbonara and you eat the veal, the olives, the
    small and glowing loaves of bread
I’ll eat the waiter, the waitress
floating through the candled dark in shiny black slacks
like water at night
The napkins, folded into paper boats, contain invisible Japanese
    poems
You eat the forks,
all the knives, asleep and waiting
on the white tables
What do you love?
I love the way our teeth stay long after we’re gone, hanging on
    despite worms or fire
I love our stomachs
turning over
the earth
There is a way
if we want
to stay, to leave
Both
My lungs are made out of smoke ash sunlight air
particles of skin
The invisible floating universe of kisses, rising up in a sequinned
    helix of dust and cinnamon
Breathe in
Breathe out
I smoke
unfiltered Shepheard’s Hotel cigarettes
from a green box, with a dog on the cover, I smoke them
here, and I’ll smoke them
There
There is a way
if we want
out of drowning
I’m having
a Gimlet, a Caruso, a
Fallen Angel
A Manhattan, a Rattlesnake, a Rusty Nail, a Stinger, an Angel
    Face, a Corpse Reviver
What are you having?
I’m buying
I’m buying for the house
I’m standing the round
Wake me
from the dash of lemon juice,
the half measure of orange juice, apricot brandy,
and the two fingers of gin
that make up paradise
There is a way
if we want
to untie ourselves
The shining organs that bind us can help us through the new dark
There are lots of stories about intestines
People have been forced to hold them, alive and shocked awake
The doctors removed M’s smaller one and replaced it, the new
    bright plastic curled around the older brother
Birds drag them out of the dead and abandoned
Some people climb them into Heaven
Others believe we live in one
God’s intestine!
A conveyor belt of stars and saints
We tie and we loosen
Minor
and forgettable
miracles.

---M. Dickman.

Our love of: abandoned places, the ruins of the heart, rich pickings, the sudden moment of discovery when the wall falls. We love our loves; our failing love, too, is not without interest. The moment frozen, the crowd shuffling out for the last time. Each day underground begins again, unseen, unknown. The parallel lives, the lost glances, the loves that were one step away. We look back at the ghosts of our lives, touch the shells we carry with us in deep pockets and recall each journey and the brightly painted numbers. The map of endless possibilities opening up like the palm of your hand. Here we are, in the belly of the beast while up above gold is greedily exchanged between blind men. 

The long steps, the short, squat tunnels, the flickering white light making no impact on the grime. The city folks in from the suburbs, numbers floating through their heads, the Japanese on their way home via the deep blue. The university students bright and keen, the only ones left with a sense of the future. You run up, burst out into the open, and see lines of friends and lovers waiting by the overpriced flowers at the flower stand. I thought I knew you Holborn, the central line to my home, but all I really knew were the exits, the ways out. There is another station here and maybe there always has been, but no matter how hard I try I can't remember it.