Someone’s always leaving, someone’s always on the way in, always saying they’ll change, always it’ll be different now and that’s true it won’t from now on always be, but only now in the saying, on the way, like the last now’s leaving and the next is breezing in

but there’s always something, isn’t there, always still a still-pic of a spill on the table beside that looks a lot like the cup that held it, the vessel as if melted down and liquefied pooled thick and viscous and distorted like a figure ripple-reflected in the pool he just dropped a stone in, into which into which into which the stone in and there beside, seeming different now he does in the moment so captured.

I’ve seen that, I have, been that and I look at my vision version still-pic in my head that holds it and all I see now is the scene-memory of a cup and a mess, just a cup and a mess, no ripples, no motion, just object and anamorphism, iconic and recognizable and affixed to its orbit like a moon satellite revolving around me like a whole lot else, like other happenings, other spills, other undead and un-gone still life scenes like space junk and minor moons and asteroids but what’s different is that spilled cup satellite scene’s gravitational pull and how it sometimes still dictates my tides and turns, the werewolf me from darker pastures and deeper hollows dependent on its phases, depending on how you, memory, wax and you, present, wane.

And I wonder
how
if
why

would that ever be any different now or ever than it is for anyone else and the more I write the more words become insufficient and the cup spills over and someone leaves and another comes and they all change in the same ways into different just like me while I’m afraid of changing in different ways into the same, thinking it’s all it was ever going to be and I wish I could paint musical notes and play colors like Paco de Lucia instead of being so word-conscious and moon-bound to the regular curing of a poisoned past by the quiet magic of the memorial revolving present in a city of not-so-nearlyish three million (and falling), its familiar crime and crumbly infrastructure and high taxes rising to cover costs of fixes that fewer and fewer people will be around to bitch about as weaker—or perhaps smarter—ones leave for warmer climes and greener grass and others just get killed or disappear in between, a city that I love more and more all the time for all its flaws and faulty faults and rudeness and violence and open-armed welcomes and routines and mixed up presence of you and strange sometimes traces of her, unfitting and otherworldly conjured, my real myth of woman, theory of love really personified, concrete-crumbling and rusted and waiting only to be torn down or quietly untended and full to the brim with reminders that do on occasion spill over, every full moon or so,

entre dos aguas, I say, I see, I say.