portrait 3

behind the rose-twined wires of his upside-down bicycle, pink-robed man offers up cardboard for charity. the mills, a pride of dense vegetation, trickling through his spokes, banners propped and armed as flanks, fauns for the downtime. he supplicates reverently, ablutions of grime and sickle-cut harvest from the close divinity of sweat and bloody iron. thrice, twice, and his eyes are still vacant.

portrait 2

orange jersey and two leg braces, wishywashy slurs across the floor, you! big-hat, big-eyed boy! how far have you come? he's smiling at the door, at next stops, next floors around and around slowly like burning paper, watching the edges buzz to cinder and melt away. close to the guardrail, at the seat of the stairs, back to basics, but you turn your head and he's gone, smiling.

excerpt 13, "ghost, come back again"

"Come up into the hills, O my young love. Return! O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again, as first I knew you in the timeless valley, where we shall feel ourselves anew, bedded on magic in the month of June. There was a place where all the sun went glistering in your hair, and from the hill we could have put a finger on a star. Where is the day that melted into one rich noise? Where the music of your flesh, the rhyme of your teeth, the dainty languor of your legs, your small firms arms, your slender fingers, to be bitten like an apple, and the cherry-teats of your white breasts? And where are all the tiny wires of finespun maidenhair? Quick are the mouths of earth, and quick the teeth that fed upon this loveliness. You who were made for music, will hear music no more: in your dark house the winds are silent. Ghost, ghost, come back from that marriage that we did not foresee, return not into life, but into magic, where we have never died, into the enchanted wood, where we still lie, strewn on the grass. Come up into the hills, O my young love: return. O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again."

Wolfe

portrait 1

the old man is pain. his feet were cut in half, taped up picked out slapped over and over again on concrete, and his wild eyes sweetly dimmed under his frazzled white hair, his straight gray beret. pantlegs rolled up ankle-high his cane taps along with birdcalls, filling in the spaces aiding its movements, he looked up branchwise scanning a small pan of strawberry gully, creak frizzled by tight whiteknuckled hands hanging off a moldy lenient trunk. he wasn't moving, engrossed limb by senses to the leaves. tap. tap. tap.