Some nights

After everyone else has gone home

To sleep in cozy beds and dream;

After all the lights are doused and quiet,

And all the doors are locked secure;

After customers have thrown their money on the counters

To purchase passing fancies from the till,

After all--

I stay behind.

It is then, tickling the toes of midnight,

Wrapping arms around the witching hour,

I unfurl my banners across the rivers, tiled!

I press my signet ring into the underside of packing tape.

In these dim, cursory fluourescents,

With deft hand and planogram,

I spend the night dressing my wards.

It is a middling job,

Strange hours beget strange habits,

And in the twilight skeins of cheapish clothes

I weave in stories to pass the time.

"Oh, Beatrice! You look divine!

That camisole of fresh-spilt wine

Is ravishing upon your broadish frame."

"Thomas, yes, those coveralls

Of cords may seem to fit with fall,

But all they're really fit for is a flame."

How queer, these dusty little frames of people

No one ever met,

All speckled-egg in color like some naturalistic lie,

These statue shades of people

Live these lives inside my head,

Ever turning, ever dancing,

Like the dervishes of lore,

(And here I sometimes take a break and lie down on the tile,

Lie upon the rivertile of the cold and empty floor

Picking constellations out from the drop-ceiling sky,

And listening to the beating of my heart--

It echoes lonely chords among the shadow statue garden,

This palace to performance,

This ever-shifting labirynth of cotton-blends and nylons

Until!)

I feel my head regain itself

Rising from the trance of silence,

Oppressive, moving silence.

And if there is a God or such,

It's in those moments It exists.

But after all these forms are dressed,

Now demure for the dayrabble's needs,

I sit among the heathered shirts

Pretending they are heather bursts

And little lilac marigold forget-me-not wildflower romances

Begin to creep upon my spine,

Growing, vining, as if a jasmine trellace to be used,

And I am thrust upon a new, exciting thought.

Breatrice, her clothes so fitted,

I pry and push her torso free

From the bolts that hold her form together by Byzantine means,

(And having switched the Muzak tape that plays on loop

For my own selection for the job,

A perk more potent than prescribed)

I begin to dance.

This moonlit march across the store,

A cavernous dancehall for me alone,

In this abyss of solitude

I think of you.

And as the beat pulses higher, faster,

Lightning, thunder, step so quick I trip and land prostrate

With Beatrice, that plastic idol,

Like Lucrece, now under me.

The swirling eddy in my head now leaps,

It dives from my eyes half-closed

Onto the mannequin's greytone form,

And for a moment, a fleeting flicker,

Like a flock of starlings all taking off when scared,

I see not my ward, my hollow maid,

But you, a face all shadow-tattered,

A face I know so well and good

That my throat catches air like spit and clenches.

Once I was your Edmund Hillary,

Attempting to ascend your Olympian magnitude

And crest upon your summit's flatlands.

You were awash in snow and sunlight,

Those warm fingers unable to pierce the deathly ice,

Your indifference as palpable as air was lacking

But I pretended I did not need to breathe,

And slipped right through your cellophane atmosphere.

But you were the beast underneath,

And there are some mountains men are not meant to climb.

Your Everest name stays in my wounds

And weighs down my boots and ice-axes with doubt.

What little snow I bring back from this bitter excursion,

A paltry snowball no bigger than spit,

It melts in the warmth of the central heating

And I roll, pallid, from the broken doll--

For what are mannequins but toys for men

Who have no one to buy pretty trinkets for?

These plasticines cadavers know secrets not to tell.

I have whispered to them all my fears and loathesome guilt.

They are my keepers, and my executioners.

And one day I will pry Beatrice's delicate hands,

Perfect for displaying rings of platinum and gold,

And I will wrap them round my neck

And re-enact the gagging, choking feeling

That you once enacted on me.

And when all the lights are off and dark,

When all the customers have scampered off

With microfiber filligree on layaway,

Or credit unafforded,

When all the clothing on these shadow statues sell,

And my dirty, hushed secrets air into the world

When all of this is done,

I take the next shipment, the next night's dreams,

And I whisper them away again.

And I whisper them to you.