chant

David Cole

It starts with the chanting. Always the chanting. Chanting is who we are, from our mouths to our ears. The sky hears us. The air carries it like clouds from one to another to another still. I chant that I am alone and you chant that you are alone and we hear the chant. We drift as smoke whirling around each other. Vaporous vestiges, burning bland. I want to be a cigarette so that I can be cradled between your lips. You want something too I am sure. 

Then there is the lightness. Maybe it was the smoke. But something is coming around my head and I feel for one moment that I am glad to be here. To stand alive and kicking and all the cussing I do every damn day because everything is so too-damn hard. We are tired but we drift because our parents drifted. We drift because their parents drifted. We drift because people have always drifted. Swirling around one another like this and you and me. You want to be a mother and I cannot give that to you. 

I am the woman you will hold in the secret place where none else know the way. I am the man you will hold in the way back when you kiss your husband play pretend. I am the manifest of your desire and dream and what you pined for through cigarette smoke. You were me and I you when we mixed together like the particles in the air choking us each every one. We were that drifting for one moment we were something more than these sacks we sit in every day. We were for one moment in time something we both needed and refused. We were. 

Finally I pack up in my Ford while you become smoke again. You go somewhere else. You find another to drift into. You listen for the chanting. I underplay and undercurrent. Swept away in sound.