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Conversation hovered like steam hiding under lamp shades,
the lighting settles on skin and makes us look jaundiced,
there's nothing outside yet she stared into it intently,
"Why does everything have to come to an end?"
For some reason, she assumes I know the answers to these things,
the questions that people are too humble to try to answer,
leaving them to gods who congregate in alley ways, dirty silver change
shooting craps to win the lottery, scattering when cops appear,
Do I have enough cigarettes to be able to handle this civilly?
"I think they do it to drive us crazy," the smoke's too thick
blotted the answer right out, leaving me irritated with a second chance,
she fell asleep in the chair while I was thinking, barely breathing--
"Endings have their purpose too--I think it's so they can find the bones."

"Quit being so nefarious," she said through sips of coffee,
"Stop asking me questions that I don't want to answer."
We're both irritated at each other's non-sense,
"But you DO know the answer right?" Of course I do,
"It's a disappearing act, okay?
Everyone in the crowd tells their neighbor it's an illusion,
they act wise, they're all rich fucks and laugh from their necks,
their guts burgeoning, searing horror that someone got the best of them,
thinking, 'He's gone? Is that the end? Is that it?
Did I pay all that money for this? Where'd he go?'"

That night I dreamt that I called her on to the stage, I put her in a box--
three taps of a wand and hacking up some gold dust, a classic vanishing act
but the crowd was gone suddenly, and I realized it was only me on stage.

(rd)