attraction

The Ego has a nightmare, and wakes up long before I do. He tramps grumpily around the house for awhile waiting for the coffee to percolate, the scent of freshly ground beans teasing his nostrils at every turn. On edge, he chews on his thumbnail while staring vacantly out the front window. Then, summoned by a desperate whinging, he lets the dog out for a piss.

I pass him on the stairs awhile later, and he just looks at me with these dark eyes as if to say, "I'm going back to bed - don't even talk to me." So I don't, and I make my way to the kitchen where I pour myself a cup of coffee, add a little Irish Cream, and sit at the table where I watch the dog sleep by the patio door, her legs kicking and lips curling. Bad dream, I think, and lift my tired eyes to the window.

Downtown in the afternoon beneath overcast skies, I pull my coat around me, its pockets heavy with books. Hegel's Science of Logic and Georg Lukacs' The Theory of the Novel tug at my waist, making their presence known. Striding hurriedly down the street, I'm sipping greedily at a paper cup of cheap coffee, watching people move in and out of buildings like shadows.

We're all ghosts down here, I think. Non-bodies gliding this way and that, spectral entities going about their lonely daily business, the true tragedy of it all being that though they are cut from the same cloth, they possess no conscious knowledge of one another. Rain starts, quickly turning to hail, and I duck into a portico, instantly melding with the stone.

But I can't wait around for long - there's another to meet. Just one bundle of atoms begging to move on, to move on and hook up with another. And these hands. These hands which will so easily forget the mind that they rely on when the waist they're wrapped around is yours.

Walking down the street,
I'm pulled in your direction;
a kind of subatomic coercion,
an extrasensory connexion–
confidante.