there is a dowdy window with spiderweb blossoms and windy holes an old woman nurses on her lap on the corner of 5th Street and Jackson Ave. she is an old seamy woman whose face is furrowed like a featureless October midwest landscape after the corn and soy has been harvested and husked; leaving only faint signs of a pre-existing life. stale and silver eyes stare back but do not answer--not anymore. she stares at the ethereal fixture of a long lost companion adjacent to her, someone the world has forgotten but she and the old oak tree out back have not. a corpse to nurture the living--or barely alive. i say, "hello". she whispers "oh, how long will someone else's sorrow by my joy". "Forever old woman" i say quiet and heavy, trying to veil the weight of the words on her brittle bones and fragile heart worn by decades of a history of sorrow. i swallow the sadness the same. her name was Amelia. i am gently lowered down into a sea of chemicals like a warm and frothy caribbean inlet--like the sea that held me when i was a child living on the island. then mother ocean holds me, and leeches the poison and gray from my worried head. i remember then, i am alive. "what is all this talk of the gray" says the preist living but 4 doors down on my shoulder. i say, "its the city; it's the pollution form the windy city, its lights pour our for miles corrupting the night sky--it makes me wish i was by the sea again, when you look up, you feel as if you are the last person alive". he laughed. it is the subtle awakening to a longing long ago lost between the hands of time. the moon is far today, and i am lying on the sand of a world razed to dust. the old woman forgets my name too.