It is best to face the lull of betrayals with open eyes or with the silence that sneers at years of revelry. I can laugh, or land head first in familiar muffin tops, the green grass of lakes or pickled pistachios, gorging on the presence of the past. But the neighborhood is empty now, echoes in a night where I am told by tired neighbors of their child-dogs, recommended the reading of pharmaceutical failures and the most potent pillaging of all, not our, times. Fruit stands now stoic undercover, once broken to the ground and built upon by giant, jealous cranes.
I still see the penguin suits where we sweated out first nights at home. These paper planes flied high, a thousand storks that could not save our name. It is in these motions that I might have been, a few years back, making light or making love, shadowed in the moonless night that heaved, breathy and barren; the night that, starless, or at least so patient as to swell around its drums, allowed a manicured melancholy: a stage not set but sorted in its sins.
It reminds me of dancing or dwelling, idling on sides streets, sticky stoops where secrets were undressed, decorum come undone, desire dappled in by teenage minds and mouths alike.
It seems, now, more a sight than a setting. It reminds me too much of what I've lost; and yet the salt of sweat and slivered stardom, of precious, gummy gems of life, beckon me to the streets. Where now, sunny and cher are revived by the chess set, small canopies replace familiar green, my favorite fried filler makes an appearance in neon light, the scent is stolen by something sweeter: a home not overrun, but overturned by time.
