Allocating Geography

Your apartment did not just harbor enough

for eating and sleeping, your pencil lines

wired around each other into sketches

and your paint shattered into pointillism.



Guests derelict in your apartment

because you lived with your art the same way

it lived in you. You could never bring yourself to have them witness

how your demons possessed the canvas.

*

Your back is turned to me

I watch as you sturdy yourself to tweak the key into the lock.

I am now your shadow when once you were mine,

a severe figure watching me measure paint and turpentine

crossbreeding viridian, ultramarine and titanium for imagined pain

dressing the canvas until it was desolate of white.



In this suitcase of books, manuscripts and clothing,

are my teenaged perceptions of you, a decoupage

from the mid part of the last decade.



Your tongue reeking with acid to rival my recklessness

in discounting Mathematics in exacting

distance and proportion,

matching linseed oil to paint with feelings instead of ratio.



In those years I came to be illegal

and flawed. The latent recklessness

as you predicted then, emerging now as a decision

to move in with you,

I reminded as I measured your apartment, prior to me,

subtracted of friends and lovers.

*

As milk clouded your coffee, you refused

without apology the pasta I cooked. You spoke of aging

and if there were any time to fortify better eating habits,

it would be now. Dessert appeared

in the form of voluptuous silence, and I ate it.

That night, there were no pedagogical, paternalistic approaches

to reconcile me with you and the art.

No longer each other’s shadows,

I neglected you allocating geography in your canvas

while you ignored the newly transplanted Bukowski

speaking volumes from your shelf.