The Best We Can Do

Every morning looks warm but it’s cold, not only in the shadows, and there’s nowhere for me to walk. It’s alright for you; you just like to get up, sit down, and smoke your head off, with your jumper on back to front. Every morning you say what a blessing this jumper has been. I don’t know what you are looking at while you sit there; if your hair is still tufty from sleep I touch you there and your head turns and voila, there is your face, looking up at me. Still I have no idea what you see and there’s no point in lingering. The sky is very promising, very reminiscent also, but it’s not a place I can go. There is nothing here! I try not to say too much because I don’t want to injure your feelings but then I remind myself that as far as your feelings are concerned I really don’t have the first idea. There is no pattern to them – then again I cannot be disdainful because I know you are not empty. The way you talk over my body makes me restless, especially when I stand there during daylight. I can’t do to you what I want to do and neither can you to me.

I feel so stark and there are so many close-knit shadows, if I run the sunlight strobes and I feel graceless; I panic. It seems to suit you, all these fast slices of light and dark, like a guillotine perpetually falling within a hair’s breath. And I get bites all around my nose which makes me self conscious and there is no privacy, and no good bowls either. I will try not to mention these complaints but sometimes, when you start up criticising me during the night for some small thing I bungled or forgot during the afternoon, it’s a challenge to hold onto my tongue. Besides, it seems you have at last accepted that I love you very much and will never live here, that I stay for a few weeks now and then, and then go skipping back to the serrated mountains, where there are no shadows and where the sky has so many lanes.