past vs future

• I thought I could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat, shot through with the sweet taint of chewing gum.
• The music lingered, a palimpsest of unheard sound, style upon style.
• I remember yearning, for something that was always about to happen and was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then, in the small of the back, or out back, in the parking lot
• In her usual martha’s dress, which is dull green , like a surgeons gown of the time before
• This at least hasn’t changed, the way men caress good cars
• Gilead is within you
• I remember the rules, rules that were never spelled out but that every woman knew
• They wore blouses with buttons down the front which suggested the possibilities of the word undone
• It was true, I took to much for granted, I trusted fate back then
• They wear lipstick, red, outlining the damp cavities of their mouths, like scrawls on a washroom wall, of the time before
• When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
• their crimes are retroactive
• The bodies hanging on the Wall are time travellers, anachronisms
• books, open face down, this way and that, extravagantly
• Their faces were happy, ecstatic almost. Fire can do that.
• The stains on the mattress. Like dried flower petals. Not recent. Old love; there’s no other kind of love in this room now.
• My body seems outdated
• Luke and I did the week’s shop, because we both had jobs
• colonial-style four poster bed
• the pathos of all vanished civilisations
• Men at the top always have mistresses, why should it be different now?
• buildings can be torn down or turned into something else, its hard to keep straight in your mind the way they used to be
• It seems so primitive, totemistic even, like cowrie shells
• Is, is, only two letters, you stupid shit
• You’ll have to forgive me. I’m a refugee from the past
• its genius was synthesis