I dont expect the steam
I dont expect the steam or the empty air to reveal anything to me. There is no augury in giving my eyes over to things that are on their way out of being or slipping forward from contemporaneity. They wont take me with them. If they did, and I saw her on the sidewalk under the tree, in the real purple flood of night, I still couldnt get back to put things in order. Staring at the empty teacup doesnt tell me that it will have mint tea in it, steam swirling around it, a hand and hand cupping it, it is kissed and tipped, that it will sink out of the lamplight, it will stay whole forever but cease to be what it is in this moment, empty and expectant. I can pretend that it is influencing me. But it is still and what pantomime I put it through is no evasion of what I will do with myself. Only I have the choice. I make all of these things happen to me. If I never touched the cup, it would never move, she would never arrive, and I would never choose. In the very long accident that I keep falling back into, nightly, and in those moments when the rush of things looses me, it is easier to try to fill the emptiness with the bits that I remember, from the things I didnt choose but which struck me hard enough to change my shape but only damaged me, I didnt really keep them, and when I try to reach out to them, in the midst of a wide blank wall of an icy green light I only find their names written on paper. I bring them back over and again because there isnt anything else that can stop the time from just disappearing and me finding myself let go, back into it all.
