Con Version

(A prose poem. Sheer whim.)

I have no cash in the bank and there are no coins in the jar. I am spent.

We talked all day, all night, of things that make up our dreams -- peace, joy, the soft touch of love in the chill dawn. But we see through a glass for most of the time, a cracked and stained glass, brushed dark with blood. There was no truth in these talks, nor could there be. But there was hope:

You laugh at my words: I am so brave and far too sure. I know my way through a dark set of thoughts, I say, and then leave the room with gloom set on my head. I thought I could see, I knew I could hear; but you were right to note that I could taste my fears -- in your kiss.

Oh, how I reach now for your hand, the stars in your skin, the soft clouds in your hair. I reach and reach, but I grasp naught but hail and rain, and sharp flakes of cold pain. You built a wall here that is years thick; I kick holes into its side and climb to a ledge made of books you wrote in jest; mere verse for the fool who loved you.

But I will leave to write my own page, and you will have to leap high to get a glimpse of my fame. You did not know me then, and you will not know me now. That is not my name!

But it is all a hurt that stills truth: truth will not move. And it will not leave. It stays like a scar on my days. It aches like a thorn in the side.

(We laughed once at the old dame who gave her one cent -- all she had -- to the poor. We would give more, we thought.)

If that makes sense, in our one vain time.


©Bill Gnade 2007/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved.

(I simply wrote this for exercise. I need to do this sort of thing every now and then. Working with monosyllabic words is always something of a catharsis for me. I've just hated my writing of late, so this kind of discipline kicks my brain around a bit.)