Opus

Gabriel

Gabriel,
do you remember how you stood before
the mirror,
The light arced on your back, and
the shadows danced on your body
and across the room to the rhythm
of music that only they could hear.
They, and us, you and I.
The music from another time,
another world, that has seeped through the years
to us,
All that remains of them, a
melody stuck in lover's heads.

Your hands were gentle, Gabriel,
and your eyes so soft. And I was there,
on the bed, pinned to an existence,
smoke-like, dissolving and whirling into the air thick
with heat and our love,
fading already, to be replaced with ennui.
I was there, trying to recall that poem
that always make me think of you.

Now, times are gone, and we have lived.
Life was good, perhaps, as one day followed the other.
I found a book that had six lives.
I lived all six of them
I was six and seven and eight
and I was you and I was I
and I see you now, Gabriel, and now I don't.
Come home with me. We will count the wrinkles
on our faces, and the scars, and perhaps you will tell me
of your lovers, and their love stories.
But there are no stories after all.

We are fading away, Gabriel.
Everything we do, it's been done before.
So are we predictions of the past, or
shadows of the future,
or perhaps we will withdraw like conspirators
to the fireside, leaving a city behind
The city that swallowed us whole.

We are a shadow now. A single shadow
Of a night past, a cramped hotel room,
Of a vision of a reality, stranded in the apathy of in-betweens.
Do you remember Gabriel?
If you do, please don't.
Memory is too much of a burden
to carry through the evening and into the night.

Goodbye, Gabriel.
I hope we don't meet again.