Canonizing Delerium

I'm snuggled up in my favorite corner window watching you smoke that cigarette like oxygen hurts your lungs and this is the only easy breath you've had all day. This corner is my small salvation, a place to quickly dump the trucks of brains onto the counter for a second and look at them before I gather myself back up again. Like I do everyday.

You have specific ideas about poetry, and about music and that's a fact. The only fact, because you're no more right than I am about Billie Holiday. Your words sound like fists against brick walls. Mine sound like the electrical pulse that won't let you forget you're are alive each second, and always hooked into some kind of machine. Yours sound like flowers blooming for spring too soon. Eager, lonely, dead where they stand.

I'm captivated by the sound of a lone voice echoing in the wrong auditorium. Or the way people apologize with their looks when they've been caught speaking aloud to themselves. With any luck, I'll strip myself down to such sounds, such looks. I will be caught always in that moment of naked truth. Without composure. With any luck, I'll never be composed again.

Of parts. I am composed of parts of people and places and ideas. I am nouns nouns nouns. You have breathed over twenty breaths. You will keep breathing them and breathing them, and inhaling smoke until I'm not there to remind you its happening. And one day we'll both stop breathing, and all we can say to each other is

Sorry you had to see me like this.