Charlie and Connie had something to settle

Something to finish they should take off line

Charlie and Connie moved away from the party

Went to a back room to be alone for a time.

Sharon stared holes through the faces in her way

Face like a dare, voice like a ghost.

"I said" she told Michael "I have no desire..."

"And no top of a list that I want to do most."

"Don’t talk like that!" says Mike with a laugh

"The world is a perfumed delicious place."

"The world" says she "Is a collection of gravities

"Each one collapsing in its own hole in space."

"A rose is a woman, and every woman a rose"

Michael parks his whiskey like a knight in an alley.

"Rose is a word, and I can’t even smell it."

Sharon says dryly, looking over at Sally.

"Charlie" says Connie, "there’s that little problem

"when you play stupid games you should be ready to lose."

"Connie" says Charlie "bring your face a little closer."

As he closes the door and kicks off his shoes.

"Tomorrow when you wake up, what will you do?"

Mumbles Michael to Sharon as her eyes start to glaze

"Anywhere you want, where would your heart take you?"

"Dunno." Sharon says, "Got no passion these days."

"Look I don’t like poems and I don’t like poets

"Your need for romance is your little mistake

"What you can’t understand you pretend that you own

"What you can’t subdivide you assume you can take."

"Idiots like you have illusions you die for

"or live for, or kill for, it’s yourself that you kid.

"When you can’t grasp the truth, you settle for meaning,

"If it rains in the desert, you think it’s something you did."

Shadows in the bedroom scrape the wool rug,

The coats on the bed are pushed to one side

Two desperate people are holding each other

One trying to live and one going to die.

"I see you know Sharon" says Robert to Michael

As she stands and thanks Robert for taking her seat.

No attempt to disguise her disgust for the poet

She walks on down the hall, leaves his face at his feet.

"You gotta understand..." says Robert to Michael

"With her piercing analysis, no patterns persist.

"Each item’s distinguished as its own separate atom

"It has no poetics, it simply exists."

"There are senses that leave when a soul loses meaning"

Says Michael to Robert as he picks up his glass.

"Amputation like this has its own anesthesia

"How can you smell a rose with THAT bug up your ass?"

Light cuts the dark as the door cracks open

Sharon surprises a girl in the gloom

The light bounces off a blade held by Connie

And Charlie’s dead eyes staring blind through the room..

Connie shrieks at the light as she spies the intruder

Who moves like a moth falling into the dark

The knife glints again in the innocent moonlight

Sharon’s arm goes limp as the blade finds a mark.

Sounds move in slow motion as Connie grabs a coat

Pulls it over her goosebumped skin as she sees

Sharon staring at the slice in her arm as it pulses

Sharon groans while her pal takes the hallway and flees.

Sharon slumps fevered in the quiet dark bedroom

Confusing her self with her wound, numb and bare.

She conceives of her arm as also an object

She knows that it’s hers but it’s also just there.

Someone from the party will play dialing for doctors

But the bucolic room is in quiet reborn.

There’s a delirious poet whose soul bloomed in feeling

When her hand lost its touch to a dagger’s steel thorn.