#5

In my dream, he was standing by the bougainvillea, digital camera in hand. "I've come to take pictures of everyone but you." He was hard to criticize, so wound in scarves and anxious curves he was. Plus, his angles were wrong. He never noticed the sky though it pressed with menace beside him. His horizon was narrow and axiologically impaired.

"Heed my warning," I said, but had no voice nor tongue. The beetles were busy with the dead. And the land tilted, that bystander, its southern slope congregating in the East. Which hides his life, and shows not half his parts. That I did not dig nor seek to steal. Love's prose too binding and resilient to mistake it for the literary.

"My father was a fail-ed man, whom nature made too free. A printer by profession learned, his heart made not to breed. Alas, alack, he is my sire, and I his duty done. Wisdom, beauty and release to let me have his fun. I have no tale myself to tell, but carry out his line; I am desire manifest and his desire mine. As all will read, who enter me, the sundry tome of time."

This was his confession, made four years ago, from his bedroom loft adorned with shadows. I stood hesitant on the ladder beside it. "I've never told that to anyone," he said. And the curtains lifted suddenly, the April wind rushing through his apartment, the scent of the hyacinth I placed on his desk carried up, up, until the ceiling. "I love you," I said. And I did. But that was years ago.