Black Cherry

Kill me softly with your lipstick mouth, glistening like bloodhoney—haunted by spirits—under the slow burn of this bar light sun. Turning turning turning your sweaty glass, lost in thought, you stop to brush willful, black strands of hair from your eyes—I think they’re blue—and I wonder what your story is. Tell me yours, and I’ll tell you mine.

Like reading tea leaves in a cup, you search the bottom of your glass for answers, through the smoke of a Lucky Strike smoldering in a nearby ashtray. Mystic vision conjured across the great divide of where you were and where you are now. I scry mine and see our fate’s the same. Guess we’re good like that.

Glancing back, you’re gone. Just smoke and mirrors in the end. A shade in the lamplight and the smears of black cherry you left behind.

Ghost

Seconds freefall from the wall clock like over-ripe fruit—rocking and rolling, bruised and rotting, to the ever-steady pace of a ceiling fan Hummmmm. Timescatters seeking dark corners of silent walls and dust ball meet-cutes.

So much familiar in that household dust: skin sloughed away, cell by cell; a head hair here; an eyelash there; maybe a crumb of hope… or two or…

Can’t stop the music—this silent entropy, destroy’r of mountains and men.

All I can do is sit and wait ‘til nothing’s left but dust-devils haunting the corners to the whoosh whoosh whoosh of relentless timeslices and reality tv.

This is what it is to be a ghost.