blondie vs darky 4 & 5

4.

Passing foodstuffs to the birds in the park perhaps pigeons most likely pigeons though you refuse to define anything categorically as though that were an insult to dignity beneath dignity to be so named yet they do show all the signs these birds they enjoy the grilled cheese sandwiches and even bits of beef from hamburgers which you chronically order and then refuse to eat as the burgers at this diner are so unpleasant the meat dried and hard and tough like dried sponges

Sitting in the park the air is cold around you and also through you feels as though you are not there but perhaps are a medium or conduit that does not stand but to stand aside observing cold moving through you like a crowd of pedestrians moving throughout the city moving upon their way in none too much hurry but absorbed in their own lives

5.

He woke this morning and did not look at you but began putting on his boots which you watched silently smally feeling small curled up naked and insubstantial among the bedclothes feeling particularly naked in fact watching him put on his boots and then remember he did not have his pants on yet and therefore grumpily moving to take the boots off again sighing weary unable to summon the energy to remove the boots which are overly tight for they are not his boots and you can see inside his head and know what sort of experience he is having decaffeinated devitaminized denurtured bleak bleary a tiredness you know of not ever having had it yourself but knowing it through him and perhaps through others before though you’ve forgotten all else about them but this feeling which invariably makes you weepy makes the world seem suddenly worth living in again

He pulls on the boots realizes he does not have his pants on sighs leans back onto the bed which lacks sheets now for they are coiled around your diminutive figure he lies back to take the boots off which because they are cowboy boots requires some effort which he halfheartedly puts his thumbs to before lying back again no longer trying about to try lying there again for fifteen minutes or perhaps it only feels to him or you like fifteen minutes the swirling of the dust eddies in the November daylight warm inside this warehouse warm from radiators rendering this desperation lovely, how lucky he is to have his boots on you think you feel it is almost enough to bring tears to you you can feel them down below surge the suggestion of tears which you have not had in many years though it feels it may be that you had them recently and have only forgotten them as you forget everything else forget all but sensations the content without the vessel the feelings without circumstances you have no tears to show but something tugs at you and you wish you knew what though the sensation is lovely even magical

To backtrack he lies back on the bed on the raw mattress unclothed but for boots and eventually does not pull off his boots he has not the energy for this one can see easily in his body lying there so sickly in its way, healthy to all appearances sickly perhaps merely in that it is missing its inhabiting ghost sickly healthy healthy sickly he is a strong man lean his muscles are wiry so to speak to borrow the familiar phrase though slender they are merely slight because of his genes and are capable of perhaps more than muscles this size ought to be they are lean rippling across his stomach as he breathes and the ghost in his flesh is so pale as pale as the skin above it is winter after all nor was he ever an outdoor type nor is it that his muscles are so well-developed but rather he is lean he is efficient you can feel this about him and perhaps it is something to love perhaps nothing to pay attention to but he is part of the afternoon making you cry or not cry rather but contemplate what it would be like to cry and enjoying your thoughts which do have a flavor full down in your chest as peculiar as a late afternoon or musty old glass of wine

Feeling your glance he stands angry possessed of an energy at last at least and walks pantless through the warehouse to the far side where he will begin to brew himself a pot of coffee shuffling through the motions the pouring of water the scooping of grounds into the paper filter in a way that denotes pain the pain of touching objects and stands back to you for a full five minutes as the water gains heat and momentum and the sound of steam bursting comes to you from across the warehouse and you are feeling so erotic in yourself and your naked body that you don’t feel you can stand it and how can he not know it and if he did would he not walk over and take you now and it would be welcome no matter what he felt if it were in anger or whatever he would call his feeling because he of course is the last to know what it is, she even knows what he feels before he does and even if he calls it one thing one day its cumulative effect in him may be something quite to the contrary

Touch her again that is he would touch her her skin is white mottled a bit she thinks and with too many small scabs and sores perhaps of the kind that other people have she is not sure he has similar abrasions she knows from staring at his back nights her fingers moving over them without touching tracing patterns imagining the intimacy of scraping those sores from his body streamlining him in that way for it seems it could be done with him and not with her which is strange perhaps since he is a man and she a woman she is the one who ought to have the soft skin but her sores are part of her body and she could not relinquish them in theory yes she could bathe well with good soaps and tend her skin but it is a possibility only and an impossible one where he is all potential and no reality, his skin it is easy to imagine smooth Greek marblelike it is easy to imagine the muscles grouped under the skin become strong rounded finally become their own shape moving into place with him it seems so easy despite even because of his momentum perhaps because she does not think of him as real which has always been her problem her issue she knows he is intangible she could stab him just as easily as imagine him perfected she thinks because the deed would accomplish nothing, he is something that always will be that exists forever even as everything else in this apartment at this moment will even long after he is dead which also is not hard to imagine

Pours his coffee and the effort in it pains her he should come over and take her now if he had any idea what was good for him or her even, she is ready to lie down, delicately wet.

He is sipping coffee now across the room staring at his walls re-centered now apparently and across the room from her he stands erect and awake.