Comme a la guerre

He rattles cavernous, cradling the old tobacco pouch in his left hand. His ring-finger hand, the one that don't shimmy so much and when it does, he tells visitors it's the tramway underfoot, but what he doesn't tell is that some nights, he'll be lying in bed in the early hours, amid vapours and fumes, listening to the building vibrate and think, namaste, here I go. He entertains death more than he'll admit, so instead, he'll cop up to precisely nothing at all. Holds on to her pouch. Kicks with his heels the months' worth of rental dust.

It was him suggested they cross over to this gods-forgotten dump. Knows the owner of the barracks, envies his broad chest, his still-young wife. His any-wife-at-all when all that's left to him is the pouch of tobacco with its fadeout Oriental vibe. All he grabbed of hers before she reremembered she was still so damn young and vanished. His call, yet no sooner are they through the gate that he heaves forward, clutches the twin doom-monoliths of his old man, bald man knees, and coughs. Once for your very good health and twice for good luck. He could use some, when there's strangers looking, and he draws on the very last dregs of dignity to prop him upright. Propel him forward. Follows his companions. Knows himself eggnog-pated and palate-cleft. Monkey-business inside an old man's pocket. No shit, man.

I watch him from a secret peg beyond my father's stoop. Me, a squirrel of the noughties right about his son's old age, but living, bold and rash, with my burnt-toast fingers and my short-crop skirt cutting lines inside my thigh, my wanting, my curious bent nose that's neither mum nor dad and reminds me of men on faraway boats and hands warm under my bottom but not under my breasts. Tiny gunpowder amulets. Think to myself, if he stumbles again, this man, I'll trade him my tits for his knees and go rickety in the night when my lover finally finds me under the covers.

But stumble, he won't. Instead, he walks proud with his hat bare under the still-crisp springbite air, this man from another time, and he dons it proud. Is careful in arranging dead flowers in the one good vase left. Reading poems, carving in the side of his desk names, but not pitchforks, though those would be more useful by much, chase away his father's ghoul leans hungrily over his shoulder.

He's been on the war path forty-odd years, and still lies sleepless some nights, wondering if he might've turned out different. Lived in the shoes of some other ordinary boy on their street, had it not been. Had he not died the way he did. And it happens now before my father's very eyes, the same way it did before the little boy's, once. It happens at exactly the same time.

My scream, his reaching over for the offered, much-relished pint. He's going for it with his right hand - his bad hand - and drops it midair, too heavy for what's left of him by much. We remain so ordinary, still prattling on when we should've drowned. That's why in the sea, there's barrier points, and he used to take his daughter to the sea, and he used to take also his son. And he used, and he is. But covered in beer, and no ghosteen hand on his wrist to steady him. For one long moment, crystalline inside my rumor-humour eyes, I take his pain and trade it for mine. I am thirteen and I know suddenly what it is to lose a son, a father too young, to have this whole other life just pass you whistling by.

A la guerre comme a la guerre, n'est ce pas?

Just something that's been on my mind. As has the man from another time, and my love for him. The oddity of caring, still and despite, for someone so visibly and vividly headed toward destruction.

And now, music.

I was so delicate when we began, so tender when I spoke your name
But now I'm nothing but a partisan, to my compulsion and my shame

No need for words now
We sit in silence
You look me
In the eye directly
You met me
I think it's Wednesday
The evening
The mess we're in and
The city sun sets over me

I just love this album. That's all. And aoo, apparently. That, too. Anyway, it's #threetunetuesday, so aloha, @ablaze! :)