imaginary fucking

i can't be here
again in this alison-kind-of-dream
there were photographs
in my papers
your words littering
the skeleton of that House
imaginary fucking
in the nursery
imaginary violence
on the back stairs
no one lives there anymore
i only made it up
to satisfy
my fears—

From the manuscript of "Fresh Wounds." This piece is entirely about the novel The Werewolf of Heartbreak and its relationship to my romantic attachment to Alison G. In that novel the heroine, protaganist I guess, Alison Clare Gaughan, becomes involved in a re-make of a horror movie that is ultimately shot in an old house, based in real life on the Hatch Mansion on North Sixth Street in Springfield, Illinois. The Knolls lived there when I first came to Springfield. And I lived there with Pat Smith after returning from living in Chicago in the spring of 1974. I went to many parties there, also. Including one which featured a contingent of folks from the St. Louis Zoo, where Sandy Martin's old friend worked. There was one guy who dressed up as a wolf and who lurked on the second floor. Eventually the idea for the Alison book came along and I ended up with a werewolf movie, set in that house. Very lycanthropic of me. But I had this idea about Alison, that she could change skins, become different people very easily. That was how she could traverse such vastly different social circles. There was always a shape-changing feel to her. Of course, in the novel she fears the shape-changer because she fears herself. I doubt if ACG saw it that way, of course. She told me that Alison wasn't enough of a bitch and I'm sure that is true. I have a friend who still refers to her as "the bitch."