I have seen that phenomenal woman through a night window and yes she is both tired and beautiful and I can be both her and that man last November walking in the rain. It was a Saturday and the kitchen lights were on, people were in the living room. She was wearing red, standing in the doorway of amber dinning room light. It was like sneaking into a drive-in movie and while it was so clear and you could see their lips move, still you could never hear what they say and yet I could tell it was a polite conversation, one held in a kitchen in formal wear. And in the upstairs, in those private spaces in this mansion on the corner of Wave and Pilacitos she dances alone, the skin screaming release from it’s cottony enclosure, sometimes staccato, sometimes a sort of flow, sometimes barely moving at all, like the fluttering of closed eyes, like that bending forward, head down crown rudely pressing through, like a waterfall, a thin membrane between this and the many worlds where beauty brushes silently passed the open window, Saturday night scents of stale beer and Lysol drifting through.

She seems pensive and the light is suggestive of late afternoon,
dusk,
and the lady in the window is still in her pajamas
like she is house bound.
A feeling like a child being punished by being sent to her room,
looking out of the window
wishing for the freedom to be outside playing
with friends
but instead alone here to contemplate
being alone and rejected.

If I were looking in from the outside
would I see a mannequin,
something made from plastic,
slightly used,
slight scratches on the body
paint, pink plastic flesh,
places,
where the careless striped her bare
too quickly,
hurling her rudely,
carelessly,
to the bottomless floor.
And now she is surplus,
thrown up on a website for the used
for the old,
offered at a discount.

I might,

and I might imagine
that blood still moved
behind the frozen Mona Lisa smile,
might imagine
that there is still warmth within
that slightly used,
slightly worn,
and plastic exterior.

Watercolor on Canvas 24X36"


It's at some point
just behind the right shoulder
a place where we are taught
to fix attention
and there it coalesces.

Last night it shifted
and I flew out of the
third floor window,
saw my daughter
and her friend
entering the back door
below
I stood on the wall outside
watching
like a clown
doing some stupid stunt,
a trick,
because everyone knows
I can't really
walk on walls
but somehow I
think I could
imagine swimming
in warm living water
under the night wire
the spotlights passing
overhead
the illicit wet flowing
over new white skin
like liquid breath
caresses.

I'm thinking that maybe
this shifting is what
we did before we
fell off of the wall
before all of the king's horses
before all of the king's men
made
this assembly
that maybe I should
just
fall again
like maybe it's better
to be be broken
and shifting the dream
then fixed
and steel.
Is this real?