Upstairs, Ghosts Talk.

 

Fixing loose-curl auburn lockets, the pins embed

And turn again. Step, and forward sway the hipbone,

Thirty, forty, a flight of granite looming forward,

Front and back, past my skirt tail – laden laced, pearly

 

Quiet go the foot pads, front illuminations rest forgotten,

Past the small mouse scuffling four-paw: zigging, zagging

Along the stair stage. Past the morning call in woodpecker

Tongue, squalls and loudly names the dawning. Softly,

I ascend the cold rough stairwell;

    careful

Not to spend courage whole.

 

Wring the rusty thoughts of amorphous dreaming, eat the

Bad thought before the stairwell – rubbish orts and morsels thin

Of single tipped barbs, and doubted quenching

    alas

Before they mean too much.

 

Wave with white hands a fare-thee-well, the apparition

That pauses; portentously grinding its nothing on the wall

Seemingly real the whitewash of nothing, he is voided

But lives existent in that other-world well,

Singing, and that much better for it.

 

Twitch the dreaming skull-bone loose, and question not,

As I mask my tooth-grin with knuckled fingers;

He spots me slinking past the wound in time

    and calls me closer

So that I may meet him.