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She’ll tell you something about herself.
If the time is right, if the space is intimate.
If the lights are dim and forgiving.
A few drinks in and a sudden candor, words are nervous,
But entirely her own.
Soon deflated by darting pupils, she slumps listlessly into the cushions,
Cool and tense,
Blanketed in silence.

The congestion feigned cheer, their glittering glasses and false smiles,
The corners of this place terminate fugitive thoughts by rote,
Glints of diversion cannot temper the imagination.
Our instant beauty from the corner of his eye, juts an aquiline nose, scope expands, Long sandy hair, tremulously aware of a sallow being,
Eyes which plead and stray.
Borne forward by champagne, gravity drains the void.

Exiled by lights, pacified in a room quite and neglected,
A man in his fifties is generally incongruent.
Too situated to meander,
He ferments and takes recourse in a poise long since broken into.
His violence is indistinct, barely kindled.
So strange, during these flickering years,
To be alone, now, with her: so young and feline.
(“I’m not what I seem.”)
Less frail than the fraility which her supple limbs communicate.
Meanings metered like syllables, she treads lightly to draw nearer.

The bosomy leather and the acerbic gin ramify evocations incompatible.
Memories deployed, met at an impasse, enemies bathed in night.
Remove the mask — he’s just as gaunt, same sunken cheeks, same doeful stare,
Only now, a creature.
And in his eyes: splayed form.

Musk invasive and fatherly.
In the sarcophagus, the child she once was,
The nemesis she’s always been.
Come, melt in his clutch, rehearse again what will be again.
Shrivel and be real, quiveringly real.

The flames out, the wistful wisp of afterthought,
Pungent breath stinging, nostrils flared, odors emitting from the byzantine mechanism of late-middle age,
Behold our frayed puppet.

Time contracts an arid space.
Spiral softly and you do the talking.
“You’re not what you seem.”
There’s a crowd of people out there, exhumed, reanimated.
"Really you’re not.”
Back to the ballet, back to clockwork, back to pockets.
Left unabsolved and teased apart: “Don’t go.”
Clean your wounds…back to pity.