To drink, to drink my ashen friends
I'll drive you all to drink 'ere long
And then, amongst women, wine and song
I'll slowly try to make amends
For the quiet deaths of the evening
Where your eyes remain opened but your soul is closed
For the brutal ravages of premature afternoons
When the sun has lain upon your skin, unnoposed
All these myriad stolen contentments
Are illusionary firmaments
Cheats, exploits, hacks and frags
Playboy girls in garbage bags
The picture yellowed and curling up at the corners
Not enough yet to warn us
And the colours, too muted, too grey
Not enough to save us, seize the days
The swiftly dying days
As we sit, in Akhmatovian content
And our melodramatic shortcomings, lament.
I remember, my first strains of english words beginning to sound like real english and not strange polish garble, when the syllables came out intentionally and not jumbling out in disarray and tasting of baby food.
I was the shyest thing on the block, terrified to speak, taking "children are seen and not heard" to heart so seriously that no one on the block knew my name...
Until someone's baby sister asked me for a story.
So I told her one. An exciting one. Where kids were allowed to talk all they wanted and they rode around on sugar-spun swingsets that never stood still, where they could tear their clothes all they wanted and in the evenings...
Mother would quietly smile at them, and tuck them in, and nothing more.
Orrit's mom got upset at my stories, I think, as did mine...
But it's another nostalgic notch in the woven pattern of torn taffeta dresses that I swath myself in after the shadows of my bedsheets have fallen over my dreams.
It's another skip and hop and drunken leap over my crazy gypsy aunt's blood and secret determination to never, ever let it go.
ANd sometimes it gets SO FUCKING LONELY out here, out back just over the crest of the hill that nobody ever espies, watching the colours of the dances so that one day if someone asks me why the dances stopped, I might tell them and show them again.
Oh bullshit and pretentions, our young Axis has gone and with a flash of loud recognition, put ideas into my head.
But I like them there. THey're good to think abotu sometimes.
It's good to remember sometimes that it's not supposed to always be quiet and content in the evenings, because one might forget how to dance.