you burn toast in the next room
trying your stockings on
my bank's login window won't save my password
how the same shit still bothers one
how I also live
in others' fantasies
each raindrop appointed
do you believe it
a lamentation from the concrete
a crack in the conscious mind
what did they expect to find with those
first squishy footsteps into this world
what do you say sugar-pigeon
creeper-vine candlelight
your hands are never still
no more silence
how the witness feels safe enough to lie down in
look at these dirty feet
noise of scotch broom shells out the kitchen window
nothing I encounter is anymore its whole self
whole origin though I
know that shape rare silhouette
same whatever I name
I thought of you lifting aloft a little mirror
half-tucked behind a bridge of river-ice.
You were full of men's chuckling voices
and the chimes of flatware there
your body a cold beam
a bronze what's bolted tough-starry untrammeled.
Rain tried you
not at all.
—It was a great scene
a real gap-and-span.—
So
I turned to you
to tell you I thought of you
lifting aloft
a little mirror half-concealed—
(come visit my world see what gets done)—
but my sweet-silver sir
you were nowhere.
I'd come to your lamplit in-my-honor river-fete
undetected
as myself,—
So I stood
amid my paint-and-powder doubles—
So I called Z!
and struck a swivel-pose
upon your barque of ice—
So I hummed gently
to strung lights hung with cambric dangling
around your set courtyard tables
around your white-mouthed night-garden trees.
Jay Thompson lives in Seattle. His poems and essays have appeared in EOAGH, Pleiades, Mare Nostrum, Poetry Northwest, Country Dog Review and elsewhere. He tutors at King County Jail, publishes Dungeons & Dragons fiction in Pathfinder magazine, and is a member of the Third Space arts collective.