Chameleon, I Read A Sentence.

But first I lifted the butt end of the mattress. Francesca stained here and here. The spots, likely blood, tissue, decay had deepened rings of hue over the years where her head would have rested, where thickets of long black hair spiraled like descending fountains until water reached the floor. In youth, one can only imagine Francesca, The oil lamp hung here above the bed, I say, Her white skin so white she blended in with the sheets, pointing to the spot your eyes follow, You had to touch her to know she was there. 

 Humph, you say. You keep nodding at my face and I think you will say something else and then don't. You put on your coat. I take off my pants. We fuck in the intestines of the room, a corner where two walls meet the floor. 20 years' layer of dirt rolled into us as if dyeing our skin darker. Winter still swings through the walls of this room. I could feel it, my bones splintering under your weight. I think of mother who in worst winters would run faucets through the night to keep pipes from freezing.

Later, I smooth my hair in the refection of a dirty window. You talk about how to properly hollow a violin. How music moves in waves around a room like rocks over centuries smoothing out into sand, how fish bones smooth out into sand. How fish bones, dinosaurs, people turn into canyons and deserts. You talk about how we feed the earth. How the earth feeds us. You are happy when you say these bright litter candied things. You keep talking and I keep smoothing myself out. You keep talking and I keep smoothing my gallant gaunt to bounce the weight of your light off me. 

Two months later I hear more about Francesca. How she died in this room. No one knows when exactly. She was found by a homeless man who broke into the basement to survive the sleet storm. He'd have to wait till morning to tell authorities. Her decay stench nearly unbearable for the man, who reluctantly slept on the concrete by the gaping hole; glass shards in a puddle by his face yet wharfs of northern air kept him there; slowly, slowly. The drags felt like menthol, asthmatic clarity of drawing in sips of fresh breath. How long had this house been locked up in the snow? How many years had the seasons past filled with winter then winter then winter then winter? Neighbors surely would have taken note when she stopped leaving the house. Maybe she never left the house. Maybe she boarded herself up. Maybe she had a boy bring her milk and peach teas and she'd pay him coins with one out stretched hand through the mud room screen door. Maybe she died of a broken heart:

I'll give you Moscow.
I’ll give you apples coated in butterscotch.
I’ll write poems for days on your shoulders.
I wear my heart on my sleeve.

So please invent long sleeves.

Maybe she stopped eating and did it exceptionally well. Maybe she did it because it feels like hell. In the end, there were many maybes we just don't know about. As for myself, I could only exaggerate her life within the ramifications of mine. She was a chameleon in one of my early poems, then a man at Wal-Mart who I watched touch every ghost piñata on the in-cap until an employee came over and asked if they could help him with something. Nowadays insomnia seeps into the foundation, and in happy delirium, Francesca reveals her beauty only in dead night when the house is silent except for the electricity hum in the bulb above the medicine cabinet. I go to it. I go to the sound. And there in the mirror, floating in soft sheets, warm and nude, her tight lips, Zwijgen, she sings, Zwijgen. And I believe her.