Michael was leaving and there was nothing anyone could do about it. 

A going-away party, in earthen lawn chairs, on an apartment roof—

His friend, Franklin, the guest,

Anticipating his departure with the same dejecting ebullience as a celebration of life, 

masticating obligatory cold cuts, white bread, and apples as a feast of proletariats—

Rain with no umbrellas.

 

Matters of love, matters of Michael, 

chronically desolate, 

taking the gregarious reins of confab under scarred and bitter hands, 

a love-lorn lover obsessed with what eluded him—

Making crust and grease: choleric jeans adorned with sibylline wear and cracks of filth, 

untenanted hazel eyes tumefied by metropolitan detention,

cigarettes lit in a bedroom that had not seen a meager golden beam for weeks—

Groaning chairs under the weight of those who sat on them,

facades, shards of denticulated paint, shedding from the slowly festering wood 

that was ostensibly fine and habitually neglected 

since it still could stand on its own. 

Michael seated himself on a distant friend—

An appearance from the well of nihilism, sitting across the table with

new Sears Gold Bond calf skins,

a kind of exhausted purposefulness, 

and suppurating sore, 

the pus of conversation, 

eyes darting crazily between the sky and Franklin who pretended to be interested. 

 

I think this will be good for me. The masochistic grit of this city really gets to you. 

Life in the Catskills will be simpler, unembellished. I ponder the elation of hunting game.

Voice, 

chalky from disuse, 

barely projecting to the audience two feet away. 

He was an author by trade.

 

Hunting?

But, Michael, you hate hunting. I believe it was in your column that you framed it a “sadistic projection of man’s grievances.”

 

I suppose I’d never grieved before then.

 

Hey, you might even find a girl to marry.

Michael emptily looked at the face of his roommate:

I’m already in love with someone.

Franklin was attentive, 

Michael historically having been bad with women.

 

Who is she? What does she look like?

Blonde hair, gray eyes, the most delicate lips I’ve ever seen, and, definitively, the perfect ears: cartilaginous and subdued, with plenty of room for my juvenile whispers of affection.

 

What does she do?

Accounting at Barnham and Feigel, 

the same firm that Franklin was employed at.

 

What does she talk like?

A brusque manner with sweet and humanizing inflection, the absolute most delicious…

Franklin couldn’t handle Michael’s authorial grandiloquence any longer. 

The question of who his roommate loved, the enigma, the untamed delirium, 

Escaping from his every orifice, 

Sweating from his pores, 

Asking before his heart stopped beating

Who is she?

 

Michael, caught off guard by the outburst, 

Stopping,

and looking

at Franklin. 

Looking at his blonde hair, gelled with rain; 

into the membranous art of his ashen eyes; 

his perfect ears dotted with the hairs of masculinity along the rims; 

his subtle lips, like window gardens for geraniums.

 

You, my love.

Sprinting towards the edge and falling, 

Floating for a second like the angel he could never have.