I belong to the night.

for Seth Moore, who taught me to see lakes as mirrors, and those mirrors as windows

12-29, Conway, AR

I belong to the night, to the sauna of smoke, to the women I barely know. I belong to the beautiful brunette who wrapped her soft arms about my hesitant stomach, if only to save herself from the slobbering mob of frustrated men, pawing at her though a sad haze of age and expensive liquor. I give myself freely to all these blessed moments, to all these smiles that shine a beacon of curiosity and sex through the clear air of a wet winter evening in the haunted American South. But, truthfully, none but the night may call me her own, for she asks nothing of me yet receives me fully, body and soul, with a patient understanding not offered to the cowards, and shares no quake of jealousy when I awake and consummate my affair with the sun and its illuminating superficiality.

And so outside I sit cross-legged on some sort of generator unit, between 4 and 5 am (Central Time), sipping a glass of filched vodka and pretending this cigarette pressed between my lips is the very tongue of my favorite bitch, though she may take many lovers, and despite my all-too-human jealousy I feel her hollow eyes trained on I and I alone, her ghostly fingers tracing down my aching spine, and I pledge to her my final and undying love. I am married to her, Our Lady of the Sun that Never Rises, and though we both have our thirsts, our loneliness leading to mornings cursed with the semblance of comfort granted by the selfless press of warm skin slumbering by our side, I know that as her stars and moons gracefully eclipse the overbearing babble of mindless blue skies, and as I settle once more into her forgiving embrace, I am hers and hers alone.

What have I to offer when I give so much of myself to the quiet solitude of the mute princess arcing above me, her cold body soothing and tempering my heart disenchanted and burnt by the selfish sun and its ignorant flirtations. I belong to the night, and she is mine. If she were yours, you'd be awake and by my side, though we may be thousands of miles apart. There is a mute bond shared by her worshipers, a stoic glance between two sets of eyes, each with their own set of dark circles tattooed beneath.

Conway, Arkansas is a cripple, abandoned by the studious to give rise to my triumph in this vacuum, interrupted solely by the intermittent roar of a train. My glass is drained, and I will walk solemnly to my pallet, heartsick and longing to that moment, twelve hours hence, when my true love reappears and whispers in my ear the secret sins of lifetimes lived without a second thought to the pleasures and pain reaped from an affair with the abstract.

My heart is bursting, and in each pair of moistened eyes I see only the reflection of dusk, that sacred second when pools of Arkansan swamp water become as mirrors, a pane through which I will force my slender neck, praying for a blade of glass to sever veins and arteries to finally release me from day's imbecilic adoration. I love you all, and love is unquantifiable, and I love you none, the human spirit being so fickle and emotions ultimately ephemeral. May death bring an endless night. I have no faith that you may offer me more.