Painting Wheat with Another Moniker

and the things we said we'd do
and the whisky and the line
rolling all the time

She said cognac was a thing of the past just like white moles and karma,a kind of transcendental lapse of the mapped out rhodes, almost misshapen except for that tiny fold along the perforation. Kind words elope in the space, they steal off or just steal the accumlated fragrance of old friends, fur, and tangled jazz trombones. That delicate peace erupts inward on a tangent, strutting out on the fly and find no more than a lip to tremble and welt, like ice cube kisses and plaster-made sides. I won't be brandished as a passe phenomenon when all I see is a comet's tail and stars curving round the narrow alley, a close for a queen draped darkly with the ghosts, or maybe a long day meadow pulling bens behind. Might we tear away the background fumbling, the host of images barraged across these wires and red bricks baking, might we carve the taste of gray hung rain into some sapling potted deep and purple in our cracked psyches letting it green and grow warm like an umber clay desert. I'll swirl the glass and bite my lip with the etching hollow voice that swills down the gullet rocks, a branded brachial nerve remembering the shock of blue flame spark arcing out of us. Just sputtering warble-warped monemes in a tremor of viscous oxygen pulling heart through teeth and tongue-taped gawking. It's possible, entirely too much so, it is, an inch worm of motion ligating fibres of one thought to blade of grass or nettle itched skin. Scrape it raw, peel it back, grind it out, all the envious goodbyes. And blink.
She said cognac was a thing of movie-time men, a lazy shadow that never ran from the light of day. Our cracked sidewalks talk all the time of these things and that, the hand prints lifting the cut capes for all the sauntering spats. There were pianos then, and violins, and one thing named Joy, but she never knew much of all the forgetting they'd do after her dance. Laughter, tittering, bell-blown glass tingling, a jagged fasting weening seersucker away from sultry bodies. Guffaw-lined felt droning in a cabaret, cigar-tied nicotine chuckling past chandeliers, whore-found buyers in the deep, ugly heat of a night-spun bar, the fans all twirled drooping in the weary haze of a trumpet and clarinet swing. All the dust that settled the tabs got pushed off with the steel cannon of wrecking balls, crashing out steinway chords and sucking back the boas and fedoras before settling for a dry gin martini. Dirty.
Cheers.