Evening alone

             

It was a third floor apartment

with patio doors off the living room

to a porch looking out onto a 4-lane,

busy with traffic, Moravia Road.

Evening’s gray was giving an edge

to the exiting orange-glow of the day

that was leaving through those doors

at about the same pace the Sunshine Acid

I’d put on my tongue a half hour ago

was coming-on.

In harmony with this transition

I left the lights off, a bit anxious,

synapses popping behind wet eyes, 

that when the total dark of night

controlled the room I would be

peaking in its grasp.

This tic was replaced by

a dawning sense of warm euphoria

as the room settled into a soft humid glow

and Eleanor Rigby’s scraping bows of violins

were totally liquid within me.

I was as alone with its pulsing

as Father Mckenzie and the other lonely people.

The darkness, now part of my psyche,

gave a nocturnal life to the walls

blooming with energy,

textured like fog -

even the nap of my flannel pants

was quivering with a warmth

and life of its own.

I opened the curtains

as the beige street globes came on

adding color and definition

to the traffic that flowed

down roads connecting

the parking lot below to the planet -

trailers of headlights branching out

in all directions to everything.

Turning back to the sofa

I felt a squash under foot

as the large-leafed fern

let out a faint scream of psychedelic mishap,

bleeding green ooze under my now heavy,

traumatized Cole-Hahn suedes.