| Five
This was me lost near the corner of 56th and Catherine (or somewhere there about), thinking of you. I cursed your name. I thought of Murk and how you did not speak to him, how mean you were to ignore your own blood. I saw men your age all around me walking home from jobs and thought of how you couldn't get to work, and even if you could, you didn't want to go. I thought of all the shifts you had been working just before the strike started, how exhausted, how just plain done you were. How one night that week before it all began, I came home to find you asleep on the toilet. How I looked off to the side as I shook you awake so I would not catch a glimpse of your thing poking up against the newspaper laid out on your lap. How you had not been like that before, how this was part of the things that'd had changed since I'd been gone. (I considered my bed too. How I couldn't fit in it anymore, how it sagged down in the middle to meet the books stacked beneath it, histories and biographies for which I thought I no longer had a use.) I remembered how a few days after I had come home from school I'd found a porno movie that you'd accidently left in the VCR. How I had stopped myself from watching it out of curiosity because I understood how it was just your lonesomeness. How I wanted you to find a woman. How I wanted you to take good care. I thought of how you could love someone all the while knowing that you would never mean as much to them as they meant to you. Page five |