I stood there with my little black notebook atop an industrial dryer, my bottle closer to full than empty, but I thirsted.  The retro-fab machinery knob was stuck perpetually time-drying and cooling off.  Funny little metaphors for the deserted warehouse night.  The buckets of paint tone and spackle, they had tackled perfectly the bell-harmonious corner of pipes and daily father-blessed trash.  This used to be a grocers; who before-art-thou who’d done the butchery, who fervently put forth a greater dignity.  The sign on the wall above me said: OUR DAILY SALES GOAL $10,000, crossed out and read in red ink said: OUR DAILY SALES GOAL Not Fucked.  I was fucked.  Or Not Fucked, not sure which.  It came to be I happened upon this through a sultry drunken woman, this my bolder bed, this empty free-for-all.  There are picture paintings on the wall and the floor is painted an abstract I must adore of the human physionogmy.  I remembered vaguely that I bought a photo early on in the night, standing in the walk-in freezer that no longer froze, but held found art instead.  I had come to see your chemically feminine paintings that hung in a line down the center of the room, I forced myself not to stalk them as I slept my ill-kempt tossings and turnings.  Had you painted them a day later, the Midway bombers would have risen from antiquity to blow holes in the ribcages, cages upon cages and in the center of your genital flowers.  I was shocked, lying there alone in a dark gallery, reeling drunkenly, feeling that I should have quipped more sloven laughter at the last burning of the last dying cigarette.  Maybe she would have stayed on the concrete floor then and there with painters’ rags for pillows.  She left at one thirty to join that overweight Anglo-Saxon who made her feel owned, she could not escape the embedded territoriality of lust and loving.  I was bitterly reticent as I awoke to the blazing sun, to a mistakenly wet morning- a three-hour rambling sleeper with a more amiable disposition and a wretched back and body.  She said they’d said she looked like a famous actress, but at night with your dark hair I thought it was only then, when you wore the little woolen coat that made you itch like a ragamuffin refugee of Stalinist russia.  You’d seen the movie- if only you had been a bit more anarchy in the stately manner that you avoided the problem, if only you’d not been so partial.  Let a good goddamn my sleeping and sleepless hours through the nauseous, salient steeps of the night.  I considered stealing a painting before I left, but stole a guest book and two expensive drawing pens instead, gleaming with confidence in my lack of guild because “she left me there in an empty building waiting to be torn down, to sleep alone,” is never a fair ending no matter what the circumstance.

robert cole-sackett