Ghost 5

Alone in yellow-lit bedrooms, contemplating fat mattresses. Alone, breathing, half-awake, knowing sleep will come soon. Remembering, remembering... In my T-shirt under the duvet, weak at the remembrance, half-thrilling, half-despairing.

Switch on the delicate yellow lamp, or the bold bare bulb on the ceiling, wake up and be adult, alive in the brave life of the real world... Consider your loves rationally, like you've seen other men do. Conceal the depth of sadness that constitutes your emotional state, give yourself over again to dreams.

Alighting into dreams, give yourself again to the knowledge of real images spurned bitterly from real life, achingly remembered, visions, images, messages, things that actually occurred long ago in summer streets, where the sunlight slanted from concrete to concrete, now rained-on, now degraded, now unspeakable. Consider her in her porch like a roadside Madonna, stolidly encamped there, clutching her suitcase, surrounded by porticoes and railings, baroque embellishments of yellowed concrete as the sun glimpsed between buildings and lit where she stood, streamed down the street, got in the eyes of all the white transitory ghosts that glided by, glinted on the windows of angry cars racing downhill, reflected, slid away, faded again as the crowds dispersed, back to darkness again where all days return.

Struck by the memories of it, struck by my pink, frightened soul across the street, suddenly frozen into love but afraid to follow its lead.... I was saddened and glum in my bedroom.