Ms. Dickinson enters the room, enters the pages of bashing skulls, enters the party to see Walt and Alan, Charles and Anne weeping over their life's maps. Their passion glowing in a lamp attracting moths and flies and rot.

Ms. Dickinson runs and hides and screams and runs back where misery loves to loath itself, where tears escape like sap out of an old broken trunk. I watch, I see them, I long to walk with their shoes in my arms.

Dorian, writer of text, startler of words, shaker of normalcy, looks through the window, living, breathing and enters as well. Throwing pennies to their feet, she has no pen, no ink and no mind to wrestle with ghosts. She herself is a walking spirit, a legend in a world full to the edges with legends.

They all wave to me and I smile, I watch and reach.

Fumbling fumbling fumbling fumbling fumbling

Letter by letter by letter they form words that do not seems to connect.

They fly themselves around each other, bottled, cobalt, chasing messages thrown to the wind, carried by dirty pigeons who bellow their chests in pity.

Anne and Allen dance to Kathy's Song joining hands in mutual disdain. They weep and look at their sagging bodies; eyes like shattered mirrors. 

They bring each other dictionaries and dope and laugh at women, at men. Drinking from highballs, sticky thin fingers sliding on the blue tinted glass.. birds on ice. ruffled and cold from battles spewed through typewriters.

Peter stands by gazing  at the angels and busboys stabbing his love like a dead pig. Wishing he could roll the dice back to 1942.1968, any year but this one.

 This new old turn of time.                                         The Tibetan year,

 this Gregorian calendar year,                                  The year of black.