before, our breath held us.

In that week of heat and quiet before the riots started, your girlfriend and I
stalked the cigarette-strewn streets and plotted demise:
yours, everything we might never know. She was a vampire
on the rotary phone we found behind the bowling alley:
gnawed slick red surfaces and drew
blood from the sound
pores down her ears and neck and shoulders.

Remember the thorn thicket around that same ill-fated
bowling alley, that house of boredom and stale beer and veterans
of far-off personal wars? I was there: your world
came loose and blacked my eye, there: our worlds
crashed together again as hot and achingly, beautifully
silent

as any Last Night. It was not the calm before the storm,
though it did storm, much later, and the torrential rains
couldn't put out riotfires of oil and broken glass
and eyes lit all along the edge of this narrow known world,
the horizon a bruised silhouette
in a waterlogged painting
in a once-haunted house.

That was the week the ghosts packed up and left.
We didn't dare speak, became the ghosts --
misaimed searchlights through our bleached bodies
phased rhythmic from flesh to nothing, in flesh
in nothing.
And when we were worn down to the hard nubs
of bone and spite and ambition
no longer needed to predict the future.
There would be no future, no rainy days to sock away for,
just one long hazy sunset without day or night.
The ship was going down and the wailing had started,

that day the silence ended
because there was no more past.
We were the ghosts of the past, all of us in paper husk bodies,
dried out by the heat of anxious waiting, dessicated
by all that left with our memories, waiting always
with a hand on our shoulders, cold
and insistent like the hand of a long-dead child.

Um... I didn't get this. You've great word choice but this really made no sense to me. So many ideas flung at you at once it's hard to totally understand. This needs to be clearer. I read a lot of poetry and this just doesn't make any sense.

Overall: You need to make the idea clearer, it's loss in the verbosity and skill of the words. Hope this helps.

Good luck
VSN

B is here again ^_^

I love the imagery here, how each word advances the last. It's very pleasant (even if the vampire is not, haha). Some points of confusion:

- "She was a vampire/ on the rotary phone" Is this the same "she" who was stalking with "you" before the riots? And if so, is she walking around, plotting demise with her rotary phone, or was the part behind the bowling alley the past?

-"It was not the calm before the storm, /though it did storm, much later, and the torrential rains/ couldn't put out riotfires of oil and broken glass" What was it, if it wasn't a calm before a storm? The storm (future) is then described, but I can't tell if you ever return to the present; is this where the ghosts come in with the next stanza?

-"We didn't dare speak, became the ghosts -- " In the bolded part, I'm just not sure what pronoun is associated with it (still the "we"?) or where it's going as a result.

Misc:

Remember the thorn thicket around that same ill-fated
bowling alley, that house of boredom and stale beer and veterans
of far-off personal wars? I was there: your world
came loose and blacked my eye, there: our worlds
crashed together again as hot and achingly, beautifully
silent

This is a particularly lovely stanza because it shows the world these 'characters' inhabit just enough to give it context, but not so much that it's boring.

I particularly liked the ending; it tied everything all together very nicely (and "paper husk bodies" is a cool phrase ^_^). However, where did the riots at the beginning go? Why is it now important that she was a vampire, or that they were plotting demise (did I miss something?)?