The quiet earth

Months ago
we walked around the city plenty dizzy and hot enough
for all of the important people that live in it,
or at least enough for the people who thought they were important.
(is there really a difference?!)

For better or for worse,
we bounced off a wall into
a phone sex call center
and waited for the employee lunch break.

A plain looking girl came out to have a cigarette and
walk to a diner a few blocks away.
I told her I wanted to ask her a few questions about her
occupation.
She told us we could walk with her.

I asked her if she ever felt like her job
was more sexual than
socially acceptable
and if she maybe thought
it was morally reprehensible.

I was so out of it that I didn't realize I was dreaming the whole thing up!
or how goofy I looked in my own dream.
She told us that her job wasn't really erotic
and that she felt more like a nurse;
talking
nasty
to sad souls,
putting bandages on their wounds.

Helping lonely people along,
a fantasy away from heaven
or at least an improper climax;
washing their feet.
"Strictly platonic," she said.
A real Mother Theresa at work in a foul place,
although I am not quite sure what a person's options are.
I can't judge.

Some ghosts are just forced
to take care of other ones.

She made me feel uncomfortable,
as if I would someday be diagnosed
with a rare brain illness.

It slid away because at that point we fell through the ground

through the quiet blackness

through the quiet atmosphere

and landed back on the quiet earth,

where myself and my second self soon realized
it was a big ol' coincidence
that we had ever been born.