Watering flowers

The palsied flips of word thrown onto the screen grow from the need for expression, to gratify an urge whose wellspring is the clarion call for honesty, not truth; the two differ. No just cause greets me, no sense of nobility, lament streaks me now, remembering what I had written one night months ago

"The flowers in the vase, whose names I do not know, sent to me by her when the promise of an effacing love, a feeling that might whitewash the woe of the past, of imagined failures, stolidly sits their brittle selves, one or two tiny green leaves fallen only as a gesture to decay rather than full conciliation to it. As obdurate as the illusions hungering in us to bind truth to lie, to make amelioration the truth itself, retains the structure of these flowers whose names I do not know"


A faraway touch, planted years and miles ago, lacquered by love and wide purple skies, gleams, a flicker. My eyes strain to pinpoint its locale in me. Nothing. An afterthought existing only as such, never apprehended, elusive. The meaning of these stray aftershocks from the quakes of old--trenchant, scarring rumbles--I've long since forgotten, if ever they were known. With disabuse or flogging they become dessicated. Tormenting. Seasons cease, hope ceases, memories are dust revived in stray gusts of wind when a stranger opens a window, door, mouth.

A rustling from behind, a street away, I can almost hear her walking the corridors briskly, mind abuzz. My head remains still, rebar all of my spine, fastened on this screen. Washroom pipes groan (somewhere), water splashes into basin (elsewhere), teeth are dutifully scrubbed (this morning).

Twenty-five minutes from now: her fresh lips press against my neck. I peer behind me, up over my shoulder, into her almost uneasy eyes as she wonders if in her gesture of care, her token to love and glance at her dreams of resurrecting love, she impertinently disrupts me. She does and never could; I've no way to articulate the point. Instead, as ignorant as always, I here pause to save these groping and cozened words; rise, return the confused motions of care sparked in our earliest times, before we were, kept with softness, water, flesh, leeward smiles.