Update; Getting divorce, falling in love with crush from my childhood, moved from the great NW to the marginally adequate MidWest to care for aging/ailing parnets.
Drunk in the Budapest underground and stripped to the waist, she gets on the tube. Years later she awakes as a child in Lake Geneva. Lake Geneva Wisconsin. The war is over and Eugene McCarthy is sharpening his teeth. Her grandfather used to drink with Lenin in Lake Geneva. Lake Geneva Switzerland.

Boot strap and sharp little teeth, white white and leather. The good guys always used to play a horn. We sang in the streets and drank gin all night with pickled habaneras and the sirens rang. It’s not healthy or right to think this way, but it’s not like I have any choice.
He was blind or he wasn’t. It didn’t really matter, he kept his eyes closed. The question of choice is really only an important distinction to those who don’t believe they have any. He used to play guitar and sing love songs to a pretty girl who smelled of rye whisky and hibiscus. She would listen and make appreciative sounds. If he had opened his eyes he would have known it was because she would lie with her paramour as he sang. The paramour had perfect vision; it was a question of choice.

He chewed the filter right to the coal and she blew a lipstick kiss and the building toppled. They didn’t stop swinging when the band went home and street lights cast shadows through their eyes; he was black and she was invisible and they had to hide when the quick boys came.

The old dog hobbled along the highway. A young man with his young bride and young child in an old station wagon saw the dog and pulled over. “It’s ok, boy, it’s ok. Are you looking for your family?†The old dog looked up at the young man through cloudy eyes. The word family brought an image of a ginger haired boy and a woman who smelled of cigarettes and lilac. The old dog growled menacingly. There was a burning hole in his belly. In a different age the man would have shot the old dog, but these are enlightened times.

She was a vagabond he was a tramp and when that freight whistle blew they both knew it was too late in the year to fall in love. The snow fell through alder and ash and lit the forest with white flames. She pushed him away with her sharp little hands but held the sleeve and wouldn’t let go. Someone was crying in the corner but no one knew who he was and so they stepped around him, like sloe gin or dead possum.

It’s not necessary, none of it.

I knew this woman who had a secret hawk. The hawk lived inside her breast like a passion or a symbol. If it were a passion or a symbol she and I might have been lovers. It was a real hawk though, a hunter, a beautiful and efficient killer. That he lived inside her breast did not affect his basic nature. Passion and symbology do not feed a hawk, talons and instinct and a beak feed a hawk. The external primate male gentalia looks too much like a mouse for me to have been her lover.

Tine of milk, white white and leather, white flames. No one listened to the band and the bartender held court, a born again atheist with a thing for the ladies. I smoked until dawn then the firemen came. The dog slept by the fire with his masters slippers in his mouth; he was a good dog but a lazy one.