Drop back.

Scan the smalls things rushing to a dark clutch of weather above the busy street.

You once said that we are smarter in our dreams you also said that words were important,

and they were said. Or so it was said anyway.

Thrush of traffic and wind: a natty legion of cirrus cloud streams over the inland peaks,

a slow, brawny pace it converges in roiled plumes and drives steadily onward,

marching across the sky, the way newer skins converge and cover the body.

So many words that maybe there might've been an inkling of truth hiding among them.

I just had to feel it out in peels, waiting through air, much like a sculptor might sound the occurring depths and store of the rock.

Molecules are in a frenzy up there. A rollicking mass of sightless matter

in violent contact. When a phone rings just below the touch, a person might cultivate

a small simulation of that.

Thunder.

And you laying in bed so many nights alone-- a date with a cigarette & a book, any book

it made the scenario complete, constantly forging your new skin.

Meanwhile, no lightning. just the birds and trees hove to in the winds, graceless,

stricken things at the whip.

And the quietly vigilant apartment houses poised together in dull weather-toughened homologue, bled clean of their grand eras like faces and hands, creaking

with the singular duty I imagine weary clippers once did in heavy seas.

Wyoming.

I watched its fleeting monochromes pass in the reflection of your aviator glasses.

Plains and sky that slid like currents into the hollows of your cheeks, gathering miles

of the kind of breathing that conquers speech.

You stared straight ahead for hours, drugged and sullen.

You looked like a cute idiot.

It's tremendous what the wind can and will bring into clarity: views once frayed

and obdurate, now bound by the hidden blessings of change.

And you are here again, fretful but playing it safe. You asked about me where once you had told me how I was. I said No once, a start for any number of pressing endings.

And funny how that word remembered the way you squeezed yourself shrill, a death-grip

on the odd solace of a back of a chair. Your mother. My hand.

A tuft of paper flits into traffic and settles after the deluge into a cozy pocket of gutter across the street-- there. The way a person might refer to another in place: there. Until the glimpse of a raincoat starting into the store cuts the show, and the rain comes.

As my hand passed across your face, at once fostering and wiping away woe and worry and a deliberate need to fuck, I told you that if a person believes in time this is what he does. Words were said. Words were important. Or so it was dreamed anyway.