it’s the night that makes you brim with it, from the mouth, no the chest, something broken and steely there, something with edges. you were never the girl, you were never the boy, only a dog sniffing by the pond for the scent of some fucking that was beyond you, lithe lovers skinny dipping and now drowned. you were always only the dog, nose in the dirt, choking on the wet grass, without an owner, without a home, hungry.

near hysterical poker dreaming forcing the hand instead of just living it because i knew if i just let go i knew if i let the random into play because i love the random i would lose it all i would be disappointed and broken and broke and i wanted a win more than anything else i wanted to come out on top to wipe out all this debt behind me so i thought and i thought and never let my mind stray from the particular hand of three hand poker even though i was waking even though i had already looked at the clock a thousand times this morning i kept going back to it and wouldn’t let the deck beat me but by the time everyone saw the hand i had and knew i got it in pretty good i couldn’t sleep anymore and the dream was done and i was awake and the hand was gone.

i dreamt of a witch who would not leave my home, having snuck up the stairs and transformed before my eyes from middle aged real estate agent to wizened old grandmother who bore no children. broomstick to her throat, how ironic, i held her in her place until the police could arrive who were masked witches themselves, and just as they all had convinced me i should let her go, i couldn’t stop asking, how did you get in? why this house? and she backed out of the front door and all was revealed and she smiled, i can only watch others have children, i can never have any of my own. never any of my own.

hardbound, hard lived, against the rails, she wrote of gaps & pressure, of shifting place & possibly the error of momentum; how were we real like this? she said,
all i can feel are gaps and pressure from where the gaps should’ve been.
all i can feel – i can feel nothing else, this is it in its totality, everything is this feeling
are gaps – empty spaces, absences in a sequence, things in a row then suddenly not, but resuming again; gaps do not happen in isolation, they can only by noticed in a crowd
and pressure from where the gaps should’ve been – pressure from things that are there now, non-space, filled space exerting, pushing back or on, things that do not belong.
there should be nothing there but instead, instead, instead.

the ghost of it, remember. it lingers. the crack through the glass, racing towards the lips. we smiled then, as all things. the pitch of a staircase too narrow to navigate. she told me the children were sleeping. were they mine, i ask, to this day. echo this, hips on parchment. hands pressed into a mirror at dusk. i turned suddenly and she had me. and the rain, the steady rain.

don’t make a habit of it. of trailing through the dark, through the bushes with spider webs tangled around your waist and pine cones snagging your collar. don’t make a habit of waking up out this nightmare and into this fantasy life you are living with an elegant wife and bouncing two children. it is the night that strays you, makes you a vampire, a junkie, a zombie, the lack of sunlight, the lack of life, these long hours into silence where the streets are draped with nothing, no one, not a single fucking sound.