Margaret Atwood Are you Here?

Table for Two

Pt One

And just let it be spoken, spilled and whispered,
this place in which it is born, beginning without
adjectives, spectacles or spurned by salt, or whatever.
The dust located and unflattering, bats and counselors, the crowd.
Because we minus, dismiss, disregard, dockets and red tape, voices mouthed through a Dictaphone.
Minute, hours, days, designed to go, in the absence of shirts and sockets, and evidence as loud as neon, glass, light that creeps through a green tinted window.
The sound of stones moving in a row, like chattel bickering and a bakers dozen of six fresh brown eggs, what agility!
Sometimes, you and I, no more you, like a halo all lit up with candles, so full of wax obscenities, small and:
I stand up to the mirror, my head and eyes full of milk white laughter, this life, treetops and mango cheeks, the Muse, grief that criss-crosses, peaches and, peach stockings, toes. What's the point?
I can make amends, ssh let me whistle in your eye, fences,
hearts and curtains, closing down.
But! Is their really any point anyway?
I could go naked, unctuous and more kinda ordinary.
Is their a difference?
I should have been a mortician.

Pt Two

Here we are again, my dear prudence, if only it could have been different, but whatever! You thought we could rename the world?
By hiding the real meaning like a kiss off stab in the handshake behind closed doors, us, ages ago, yesterday, I see your eyes, those alabaster orbs of
indecision, regrets and, parachutes made to not open, and sky and lies that confuse the clouds, and sentences that drag on and on.
Your mouth full of too much annunciation, sniveling, carnivore promises, and bifocals breathing like a father's one last hope.
I cannot resuscitate the dead, they're gone in a procession of a several million others, millipedes, footsteps.
What's the point? Why all this attention?
Paint the sky true blue and the moon red, rub it with olive oil on paper like pebbles, that line the shore, on an almost empty day across furniture, and let's get back to the ability, for what hope have any of us truly got, and;
How can the moon light up the night?
Maybe we could settle this debate over a night cap coffee, after all its been two years since we left the trenches, trashed the fences that stood in front of the ceiling wall chandelier right behind the moat of our precious defenses.
Do you want the truth?
Or have you heard just about enough already?

Pt Three

Go ahead tell me about convenience, midnight, perhaps I am listening, like a bee you leak pollen paper, but the audience is less than honest, silhouette that swims with apologies like a loose stamp fin.
Fledgling nature, wing, tail. So what!
Do you sigh as you kneel at the base, foot of the bed
as brittle as china, cupboard, all flustered and trying to cover up with dusty pronouns and places
you might have frequented.
In a vacant interval, do you hear it?
The silence that looms and shatters the sound like a veil, immodest.
I wonder can you remember?
December almost tragedy snow white blue petal
flakes falling, and, hands raise high in the air, snow angels on the ceiling and, the fan muttering on the floor.
Halo, and for an instance, we're both still here. Shameful!
Did you actually shoot someone? I think of you like
bones in the wind rolling across the plain sidewalk cinema by the lake cobblestone road as dull as a neon lamppost
and atoms.
It's five years on now, where should we start to unravel, unpack, everything is becoming everything else, yellow, carnation, earth, I could stroll, ungrateful and refusing to cry out or, so full of prattle, symmetry and punctuation, clever, quietly questioning the windows.
Can you really change me? you must be kidding, are you just bureaucratic and unfamiliar, let me escape this place.

Pt Four

And so what has become, begotten like a promise, a whisper of doves, square Vatican cathedrals, white robes and red crosses emblazoned with false vows,
When you knelt in a row of altars upon a rainbow and mahogany pews, like a double agent sent to conspire with angels, pidgeons and rain, clouds like soup choke; and chiseled chins and blurry recollections.
When you prayed to the moon outside your window god, reaching stars in the night sky, and what was it you wanted to say in the silence without confessing, your invisble muted gestures of lips, a mute song playing on the radio in the windowsill of the topaz coloured kitchen tile surface.
But in any case this is almost-holy. white sacrament, feathers, truth and shadows, stiletto aria that blesses in the name of red roses.
And I will listen to the owl and the pussycat argue, the smell of dandelions and a scroll unrolling like an evisceration of tongues, wagging, yelling wild obscenities from a pink gondola that rises through the terraces like treetops;
And millions of squirrels like wings, and,
Do I really need to repeat myself?

Pt Five

To all good women and men who happen upon this shore with a bundle full of hope, bells and whistles, thistles, cannonballs and cake.
To all those who have served pie in slices, slabs, grovelling for seconds, and all that civility, high society, etiquette and strings attached.
Bling like a violin cello, one gold ring, fellowship, span and scope.
To you few who think you have been chosen, you cannot be elected by veto, you are dismissed because of resignation.
So sign here on the dotted line and don't read the fine print.
To you the selected by Canadian American Idol, you may have made the grade after the commercial break, this is all about ratings, right now we are slightly above par, but very close to being level. Let's just cruise on automatic like a robot controlled by remote signals from across the room.
To the survivors, the brave ones who braved the elements and portaged the pill boxes, tubes, boobs and drug filled skies with red eyes, red flat lined like a lost passenger on platform thirteen.
You in the margin, in the silhouette, high lite reel, celebrity, the face we all want to see when we look in the botox mirror.
You are, you almost on empty, where is your personality? Show me some spunk its only mid June.

Pt Six

So this is the way life is, autumn has come and rested its crimson residue upon the ashes of yesterday's brow.
What remains honestly?
After oblivion that exposes itself in blemishes,
Just like a hammock on a flat hilltop that stretches time, a riddle that sits like rush hour somewhere in the middle of a stop and look sign. Stop and look but please do not touch.
Wait, yes wait to be licked by someone else, or dragged by a world full of slogans and instruction manuals printed in Spanish.
Is anyone listening besides you?
I could say that I have no regrets and flatter the wind with lustrous lies full of blush to try and console even the lowliest beggar. But by who's decree?
We are on the precipice, the verge of truly knowing ourselves, even from such a short distance, honey!
This has nothing to do with permission, fore go the dandelions and roses, the ungracious tide sea that lashes my brow.
I feel like my skin has been rubbed raw by pewter spoons, that their is indeed no reason to celebrate the sawdust, baby!
I can think only of you, the way the moon falls apart like asiago, like old bones clanging when held under your gaze of toxic powdered intensity, your telescopic vanity that establishes sandbars fro fish to swim on.
We may still have the sun made up of corrugated Styrofoam cups painted orange
and yellow but and yes I mean but, everything is leaking collusion, sulfuric acid tears of lead, like a river corroding it's own banks and crippling its desire to sing.