FEEL

Back in 1994 she was the model of all French fashion, her hair slightly unclean and tied up in a Princess Leia double knot cinnamon bun. She’s always late but ahead of her time. Never shaves her underarms and on occasion, wears makeup, and even glasses. All of the time talking to me on the phone she decries America, God, country and all of the boring bland music of the Rolling Stones at once.

And from her bedroom this morning she says “I am thinking of moving to Seattle”, “There they know art!”

Yeah whatever, I reply, adjusting her very large Persian cat off my lap who always seems to sit on my nuts, crushing them as if cleverly taught. “I am moving Rob, Did you hear me?”

This I something that she does to get some Pavlovian response when she’s curious about “feelings”, but I know her game and it never works. And so I answer back “You’re only 24 and all you do is listen to goth!”

The Bauhaus is turned up as her answer back as I can hear her pee in the bathroom.

She puts her stockings, black combat boots & lipstick on and pulls up her short catholic schoolgirl dress with no underwear beneath. “Oh yeah? Well you’re an old fucking jazz cadaver!”

I am told with a smile as her cat calmly watches from the windowsill like tennis.

But now its Sunday morning, almost noon and she has to go to work, and like

Dracula’s Renfield drawn to the fly its springtime in New York.

And soon, she will eventually move to Boston instead of Seattle, never knowing, never hearing the truth.

That she was all of my favorite things and that the time machine of the mind can never replace “feel”

~ R.M. ENGELHARDT

FROM “THE LAST CIGARETTE, COLLECTED POEMS”