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You called me the denizen of a black room, the only one awake at this hour, tenant of a dark, inescapable night. I was transformed by the moon, to howling, to loneliness and two-beer bedtimes after writing about this smouldering hour. This sound, the long forgotten rhythmic hammer of my blood, I will write all day tomorrow and at night I will buy Sleep a drink.

I read your poem today for the first time, and though I was inspired by your march of sorrow, it did not make me weep; for sorrow is an old wound. All that drifts down to us are the memories of New York evenings, seeing how many people we can forget, drunk in a bathtub, or lose over the phone.

I have felt no more powerful urge than the one to leave, simply stand up and walk out of the coffeehouse like a powerful memory. The scent of grinds invoking harsh sleep. After I have sat still in the kitchen and perfected the art of non-being, watched the miniature yellow lilies caress the page for hours with their soft yellow tongues, I thought I would know freedom.

Two nights ago, Carter making bacon in the bright kitchen at "2 am," we lost ourselves, I introducing him to a new friend: "you are the prophetess Cassandra," I said in my head, or, the only one I have ever met, at least. She wondered aloud into runny yolks: "why do bad things happen?" and the door sealed shut, and we were trapped in the room where she predicted a bad happening. It was funny, but for some reason I remember it tragically, perhaps because it happened under the thin veil of night.

Now I am dreaming and forgetting in that same kitchen, bright and clean, leftover from some unwanted heaven. I am my own creature's dream, the room just down the hall remembering, too. It's been a long time, but the writing comes thick and strong, like blood from beneath (what I thought) was a scholarly scar.
Because I could write and you couldn't, I imagine you sitting, legs tragically crossed while I recall myself, slowly unfurl myself, resurrection piecemeal, and you, bitter nightflower, shut, curled up.

Now another you, you rescued me from that dark, locked room the last night you were here. It was a small kindness not beyond your capability. I no longer search for the dark room in you; there would be no comi-tragic rescue. He had just learned to cook bacon, and the room was blue, not dark at all then. It did not belong to me or to the kind of people I knew.

I did not believe in locked rooms of cooking as much as I believed in you, and your eyes I'd known so long, maybe since I was a child, hidden in all lost things, in games. I knew you in pretending, and especially in tears like soft water from poor sinks.
Now, at home (or at least I cry "home" sometimes in my sleep), the last night we didn't sleep in the same room, but you still saw me there, perhaps in more nakedness than tears or dreams or childhood games.

It wasn't meant to be a rescue, for what would we be if you rescued me, dark eyes? We were monsters in the room together. You laughed, because it was a joke, getting stuck in a strange room in an unlocked house. It wasn't even locked really, the door. I held the loose knob in my hand like a burning coal. We were monsters then too. Is that the wilderness between us? The space we cannot cross because it is our territory? And I am not forgetting in the gassy fog of the bright room, listening to strange music of the afternoon, watching the knowing roommate try to light the oven and looking into the warm dark pit, wondering, pink Bic in her hand. I feel their kindness around me, though they are strangers, and I do not feel you, even a bit.