Epistle. To: Berlin Film Actress

Coffee. Ah. Dark bitter liquid made from parts new morning with demolished night. How it takes hold and then makes you up and before you know it you've slipped from a yawn into something like a smile the gods might flash. Second cup. Now you can think. Past stations narrow as love and hearing the landscape worker across the street starting his car. With no rain in the sky the sky fills up with a tired faraway light that enters the windows through broken clouds. I'd like to think it advantageous to run from dreams and leave them hanging but that would appear an impossible thing to do. Who runs the racket anyway when your eyes are closed and the grid of what's possible can sometimes paint you into a corner?  Spider webs caught before the light and etched with dew between the brown limbs of the rose thorns. The trees leaf out like old silent characters tuned to some invisible wire reaching across the earth in hemispheres and on a cue we don't know yet deeply enough about they break dirt according to what season is facing where. The nurse yesterday said man you have a lot of movies! She was looking at a pile on the desk that a friend dropped off the yesterday before. They pass the time between our appointments I said. Or rather they create a flush to live within, an anti-time, a couple hours where not much else matters. Wow John Woo she said. Ballet I said. Gunplay and a hyper-crowded Hong Kong introspection with as many cigarettes smoked as bullets are fired and family or business ties that doom the hero to logic and somebody else always lies dying and somebody else always does the talking. John Woo she said. Yea I said. Then it was all saintly professional hands at work, stuffing a bleached soaked gauze inside the damn hole and then patching me up for another day for another go round. Thanks aren't enough to offer I said. She was too smart to say it's just my job. She took my vitals and filled me out on her laptop and dumped all the necessary medical shit into the waste can. Ah. Where's time when you most need it? But she would be back. As long as I had a wound like a small pet attached to my sternum she would be back. And we've gotten to it already like a correspondence because she doesn't even call to schedule. She just shows up and I'm ready. Too bad things don't really exist. Too bad she had a job and I was just a client. Maybe she had a husband but I didn't see any ring. Maybe she had a boyfriend she didn't talk much about. Maybe she was gay and that would be the total hole in the fence that surrounds us. None of it mattered.  I needed to get somewhere and she was trained to help me. But still. Who doesn't imagine when someone else looks inside you and sees the flaws that aren't healed? It's what you remember I said. Like counting on any thousands of locations where you might be. What she said. You need to climb through to some other side and maybe I don't know what but maybe run away and be someplace else and maybe be somebody else. She sanitized her hands for the last time from a squirt bottle that made the day bed room smell like a death vapor for germs. Germs I  said - when I hear that word - it's like that routine from a Three Stooges comedy where the guy goes nuts when he hears the words Niagara Falls and loses it like he's hypnotized or something - sorry I said. What I remember I said was looking out over the rooftops of the hospital. I touched the window. I wanted out. I was locked in a climate controlled room. In a building where there were climate controlled rooms were the sole option. Where scores of machines beep in the dark like small frogs calling in some fertile night air - the incessant clatter and bang from carts being wheeled around crowded halls and crashing into whatever happens to be in the way in a crowded hall - toilets flushing at all hours no matter what time it is - the IV stands like guardian angles assigned to everyone as a kind of personal help only digital numbers and green lights to live by watching over restless laments and bad television shows  and the stunned beds of those waiting on the cusp to leave this shit behind one way or another - I'll see you tomorrow she said.