For Levi

Levi -

The closet was empty, the back wall a barren space I wrote your name, over and over, where someone will find it after I die.  For now, it wraps the circumference of my ring finger in Hebrew, a promise to burn you into the places of the universe most incendiary.

While I suspected it, I stopped asking if we might be the same creature after you destroyed the lab.  It stopped mattering to me, squarely in a moment, to codify such a thing.

Last night was the new moon.  I don't want to know who you are, really.  I want to sink any inclination I might have about what life is like for you to the bottom of the ocean and lock it in a chest.  I want to have no inclinations, never bring them to light, and forget them utterly, for what it might mean about me....

We might've once been a part of a fairy tale where we find our way through dark woods and discover our mutual father was the moon, but I'm not sure I believe in it anymore.  Not the fairy tale, or the magic, or the sameness, even.

Although I wonder if I mean that, or could even if I tried.

- Z

Man 1

Adam,

The dealings of all men could be counted as the same, if one looked with a broad view and a nameless longing.  I think they must all want to... stay alive, at first glance, but a second would tell me it's that they want to know they're alive in the first place.

I think about the kind of man who would ever know something like that, and what it would take to wrestle that from the world, like drawing a smoke circle from the air.  Practice, consciousness, physical poise and grace, familiarity with the air and the way the ring is formed, and many other factors a man is designed to overlook.

Blow a smoke ring, darling, and think now on how you intend to live before you die.  Think now on how solid and real and present you are.

Now watch it stagger, and dissipate, as shaky as all the realizations of childhood forgotten by an aging mind.  For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

I reach small fingers into the chest of the man, into the hollow cavity of the man, and wind him up.  He winds until he stops, and ticks.  He ticks until he would tick no longer.  Until the ticking should stop, and what difference does the stopping make but to signal the time to wind?  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

Tell me, with your utmost honesty, does a machine fear the evil of which it is capable, as a man does?  But what evil would a clock ever be capable of, but the marking of the passage of time?

And as you are a music box, here I wind you to dance, as the rain turns back to snow.

As Ever,

Evelyn

Homecoming Seven

As the night starts over, I can feel Clyde in the distance beyond me.  I know we're racing to meet somewhere in the city, his wings showing more age than mine ever will.  The dry wind gusts hard to tumble me to one side, and I come to in a hotel shower, a slip of soap at eye-level, white and smelling of roses.

I expected Clyde to be expecting me, but I can't tell if he brought us here, or I did.  The water is a temperature that feels translucent to the skin, bathing in something imaginary.  I shut it off, and open the bathroom door to a room mockingly familiar.  The hotel room he abducted Bonnie to, all those years ago.

The light is dimming with the sunset, and the feeling in the room is one of having sent her out for ice.  He's a timeless version of himself, his skin tumbling over the wideness of his arms, black jeans flexing painful as he turns over in the bed sheets.  I wonder if maybe I am her, or if the clothes on the floor are hers, or he's on his way to find her.

Steam escapes behind me and vanishes in the dry air, reflected in the light from the bathroom.  The room smells like his shed clothing, his sweat, the oils of his skin, and something dark beneath it that might be regret, or longing.

"You look like an angel," he offers, watching me tuck the end of my white towel into itself.  It's stiff, and thick, and it smells like disinfectant and cinnamon.

"I would if my roots weren't showing," I tell him, and he turns a final quarter to lay on his back, his arm over his forehead, his body sinking into the sheets, a color not gray or purple or blue, but bruised.

"Mare," he sighs.  "Your roots are always showing."

The slow shift of the light of the city bleeds into our drawling speech, and the heavy heat of Clyde oppresses all of our sentences to break in half, drained of meaning and consistency.

"Are we lovers?" I ask him, and he sits up to light a cigarette, the pack's white and red label seeming generic enough to startle me into the uncertainty of what movie this is.

"Aren't we always?" he asks me.

The resentment on his face that I would ask such a question makes me laugh, and I cast around for something to wear while his frown deepens.

"I just can't tell if these are my clothes."

He looks out the vast windows, ashing his cigarette onto the floor, the back of him in silhouette.

"This isn't our room," he observes.

"It's not?"

"No," he shakes the back of his black head.  "No, I told you about that one.  It's a hole in the wall in Michigan.  I told you, some starlet took her throwaways there."

"Some boy who..."

He pounds the glass with an open palm, the sound startling me.

"LOVES you," he barks, and then laughs.

There's something harsh about the love he has for Marilyn I want to say is something I don't recognize.  I want to distance myself from it with experience and time.  I want to tuck him away somewhere inside and show him that times sure have changed, and he never needed someone like me, anyway.  Whatever ways I didn't have the time for him before, I have for him now.

But then, maybe that was always the joke.

The small palm plant next to the window reaches for the last beams of the light of the sun, and I sneak up behind Clyde holding my breath because... he actually might feel safer around me if I'm dead, and the man of him lapses and relapses into boys and girls and women and dogs in a fast succession.

"Just who the fuck do you think you are?" he asks me, his voice edging on tears.  Anyone else would think he meant to challenge some idea of myself I had.  I know he's really asking for an answer.

"I don't know," I whisper, touching his shoulder.  "You?"

He shakes his head, and the tornado in his black eyes settles into the sands around us, calm again.

"You wanted to bring me home, and we crashed into Cairo," he observes.  "You think you know something about me now."

"Yeah," I admit, and put my arms around him, to touch his damp skin to mine.  "Welcome home."

"Thanks, Fox," he says into my hair, and I disappear before Bonnie comes back.

Homecoming Six

Your earliest memory of him and what impression that might have made on you. (What about yourself might that have shaped?) 
My father drives a blue truck; a mid-80's Toyota, a '76 Chevy stepside, a 1970 Chevy C30 with sling-wrecker, a '67 Ford 5100. The interior is dusty and the plastic parts of the dashboard are sun-bleached and cracked. The foam visible beneath is brownish-gold and create a grit that salts the floor mats. The seats are covered in wool tweed that is striped in the center of the bench. It lends the car a smell that edges away from the industrial and grease-spattered smell of a machine, toward the wet animal scent that will make me believe Stephen King that cars can come to life.

It's this truck from which the rest of these songs will play. The denim jacket or plaid flannel my father is wearing will creep up his reaching wrist and expose the bones and hair of his arm as he shifts gears of his truck. The heater bakes the sun into my clothing with a gale force from the vents well-polished by the oil of the same hand flipping them.

The truck rattles, things swing from various rear-view mirrors, the glove box has the corner of a map sticking out, and radio crackles to life, the CB buzzes soft and quiet, and he is singing to the radio in an unselfconscious way that makes me feel the same as being on a date with a popular boy, although I won't be able to compare the two for another 12 or 13 years. He is singing a song to me, which becomes harmlessly about me, my lullaby song, and then our song. It's the first time a song will ever be dedicated to me, about his favorite part of me - that I have his eyes.

The kind of woman your father liked and what that meant about him. 

The fragility of the girl my father falls in love with, by which I mean her outward femininity, is something that he intends to erode over time to reveal something stronger than he knows himself to be, the way water is applied to stone until it polishes rock away to reveal diamond. His primary objective in their relationship is to be the thing which has done all such eroding. He knows he can't afford her a better life, or an easier one. He will be the hardest thing to deal with, if his children aren't, if he can stay to see her raise them at all. Considering how he finds the girl through which he can see the queen is something I'm unsure of, as far as how the boy of him might do that, without a crude and justified harrowing that leaves them both the faith of each other.

His favorite movies and what that meant about him.

My father loves movies of any kind, because he loves romance. In this way, I think we're alike, as perhaps not romantic creatures ourselves, but creatures who love romance and to be romanced, less by lovers and more by the poetry of life itself. This song comes on at the right time, as the sun is getting long and slanting gold light in through my window from across the fields we pass. He squints as the light hits his eyes and loses his thoughts to the cinema of this moment, perhaps likening it to Easy Rider, or North by Northwest, or The Wall.

His sense of humor. Did you inherit it?
My father is a clown, in all the permutations of one; Jester, Pagliacci, Harlequin, Pierrot, and so on. The buffoon gives way to the despondent straight-man, who darkens fast and without warning to the venomous satirist, all of them innocent in the face of that which they are mocking. The world to the clown is one where there is respect for nothing; only a gentle and easily-packed-away affection for the thing you are attempting to murder for the sake of making your point. Kindness slides inverse to how funny they think something might be. Even Jim, steeping in his Southern charm, grows the black fervor of political paranoia in an election year, or when a war is declared. This is one of a few points he leans back in his seat, resting his fingers at the base of the steering wheel, and stepping slightly on the gas as he lights a smoke. Because we're having fun now, baby. And we are.What did he want from life? If you don't know, guess. 

What did he act like he wanted?
My fathers are all dragons, and dragons only want one thing: to know. We lose the light while he smokes and he takes this opportunity to give a sermon on what he knows of the world.

The last time you were mad at him, why were you?
I honest to God can't remember specifically, but our temperaments dictate that he said something he didn't mean, and I said back that I hated him. I can't remember any details, but I know there's no worse feeling in the world. Angry fathers are perhaps any girl's first experience with heartbreak, and the romance it takes to restore them to being whole again. It's from him I become spoiled to be sung apologies to on a guitar, and learn to expect these late-night rides from boys in my high school.

What did he think it meant to be a man? Was he right?
As any dragon, I think my father's manhood lies in the struggle between his integrity, and his devotion to love and magic, and how one can come to define the other. The true measure of a man, to my father, is his ability to stay afloat through the madness of his cul-de-sacs of reason.

What wouldn't you have survived without him and why?

Adam.

What was something he seemed to know everything about?
As a baby, anything of bright color was plucked from the earth and shoved into my mouth, as if it were delicious. My father would be standing behind me, to tell me to spit it out. It was he who let me chew on his violets and laughed as my face crumpled over their perfumey flavor. He knew exactly which could be ingested and which could not. He seemed to have an endless knowledge of that which was poisonous. He knew all their Latin names. He knew every name of the colors which borrowed their titles from the natural world, having applied each to the walls of our home, and the patched doors of cars. 

What was something he seemed to know nothing about?

Although I don't consider him effeminate, my father seems to know nothing about the trappings of masculinity that define what I think we both see as brutish. My father has never been in a bar fight. My father has never willingly gone fishing. My father does not hunt. My father ventures to the woods only to cut down our Christmas tree with a hatchet, and to bird-watch. He is a builder, and a carpenter, and a mechanic. He works with his hands, now rough instruments of the task performed, but he grew up playing the piano, and whittling sticks into small figures for his mother. But he did all these things in disregard of being a man. He did them because he's a toy-maker.

What do you wish you'd have asked him?
I guess I wish I'd asked him about what being a girl meant, because I don't think I asked anyone at all, and I'm not the same kind of girl my mother was. What I really wanted to know was what sex and love meant to men as men, so I could know what it meant to me as a woman. I could sense he wanted me to be a certain way, when I was a girl. I could tell that there was something inherent in my gender that made him feel uncomfortable as a father. Some uncharted, unconsidered thing that was sobering to him. Where he was not prepared to have one, he had a girl to raise. I think he wanted me to be the kind of boy he'd planned on, and, barring that, the kind of girl he could understand. But what kind of girl that was, I'll never know. I only know the clothes that she wore.

What do you wish he'd known about you?
I wish he'd known that I... was really his.

How are you most like him?
By being Bruce Lee.

What about him do you wish you could see more in other people?
I wish everyone were as romantic as he is. I wish everyone believed in the revolution and wanted to learn about their enemies. I wish more people drove a truck like his because it means something about freedom.

Your last memory of him.

Denim scraping on the bark of a tree, flaking dust into the fabric.  Hard palms scraping smooth young branches.  He leans down from the height of the tree and smiles, crooked.  

"You scared?"

Assuming no one ever really dies, what is your relationship with him now?
We talk a lot, not out loud. I can feel when he's close to me. I can feel him in Brad and John, and it feels like home. Now, it feels like keeping an idea alive that he was a harbinger of, but did not embody. It's our job to teach each other and our children what the spirit is that he heeded in himself. The legacy of being a dragon, maybe, which he handed off as a young man's game years ago.

Did he believe in magic? How could you tell that he did or didn't?
Yes, of course, and was for a time a master of it, and did for a time know from where in him it came. But he's the kind of man who looks for that.

What does he smell like?

Denim.  Lime.  Cigarettes.  Toothpaste.  Wool.  Engine oil.  The inside of a car.

May 14th, 1966

Dear Evelyn,

It’s funny to think how a little thing like eye color could change everything. Alright, maybe it isn’t so funny.

I hope it doesn’t say anything bad about me, but if things had turned out differently, I wouldn’t be writing this letter. I hoped I would never have to, but you’re a girl now and nearly a woman. I’m doing it knowing full well that Joshua just doesn’t have the stomach. I don’t blame him. I’m only doing it because even though the truth can hurt, you still deserve to know it.

Like I said, I planned to give you this letter when you’re a girl, nearly a woman. My cowardice might make me wait longer, but the reason I’m writing it in a letter is so that it’s at least never too late for you to hear it straight from me, in case something should happen to me before I decide to tell you in person.

I’m going to hide this in the very bottom of the pantry, attached to my Olivetti typewriter, the same colors as your eyes. It’ll be where Joshua can’t reach, but you can. I like to think about you finding it some night when you’re helping him make dinner.

When I was 15, I ran away from home to live in the city. Joshua was 15 too and working for his parents in a musical instrument repair shop. I was heartbroken before I met him, and sometimes people stay heartbroken forever, but God smiled down on me, and I didn’t have to. I knew right away he was the only one for me.

The reason I ran away from home was because my parents wanted to send me away. You were conceived the moment I lost my virginity, and they thought I should be put into a convent. I loved your father very much, but when his parents found out, they moved him across the country, and I would never see him again.

It killed me when your father moved away, and when my parents said they wanted to send me away too, that’s when I ran off to the city. That’s when I met Joshua, the very next day. He could clearly see I was pregnant, but it didn’t stop him from falling in love with me. He said he would always be there, and he would raise you like you were his own. He said he would protect you, teach you, and do the best he could to provide for you. I knew then that nothing could separate us.

My mother almost didn’t let us get married, but Joshua’s father happened to agree with it, and he’s a very persuasive man. Joshua worked for enough money to open up an auto repair shop, I had you, and we made the apartment above the garage a nice place for you to grow up.

When you were a baby, I thought if your eyes turned brown, we’d never have to tell you he wasn’t your father by blood. For weeks after you were born, I watched the storm clouds of your infant eyes clear up to something clear as glass and blue like ice. You had your father’s eyes, and if you were ever wondering why, now you know.

I knew nothing could separate us, but I just realized that if you’re reading this, it means something has. Joshua was the love of my life, but now that I’m gone, he’s going to be the love of yours. I know you’ll take good care of him, as I know he’s taken such good care of you.

All this may come as a surprise or maybe you were clever enough to guess something was off. Whatever the case, as my last piece of advice- Don’t let the surprises of life make you love it any less.

Love always,

Mom

From Martin

The floor was painted flat black and wooden, the planks eating through in pinstripes of dust refusing after centuries to budge.  There was a decision made, sometime in 1910, that the space beyond the world was black and ignorant, absorbing noise and utility and confusion.  But dust settles on every artificial surface, and in dismay, creates the stars.

The stars around Dave are wads of notebook paper and white gum wrappers; flecks of dust and the gray diamond tracks of grime from a thousand Converse creating galaxies.  The room is truncated painfully by a gray trash can and the velvet vanishing of the back wall synonymous with nothingness.

There are no blacks which match.  His jeans are faded enough to see the grain of the weave which made them.  His shoes are worn enough to be browning to the shade of wild animal skin.  The floor is dirty enough to be blushing gray beneath him.  There is no black but black, and it's found at the end of the last applause.

He lays as if recently collapsed onto the red cushion of a mattress.  Sleeping.  Of course he would be sleeping.  Sleeping in the wrappers of the universe, in the ground-in black smoothness of gum pressed into the velour of the mattress, and the wide stains that remain unidentified.  Of course he would be sleeping here, steam rising from the plains of his back, sweat drying his skin stiff like tears or semen.

I lay next to him, my head touching his, our bodies apart and adjacent.  His eyes flutter open, brown and unfocused.

"Hey," he says, his voice quiet and encroaching on hoarse.  "What are you doing here?"

The shy politeness of an expectation met.  The gleam of receiving a gift for which you did not ask.

"It's snowing," I respond.  "There's a blizzard outside."

And perhaps we've never met before.  Perhaps, having never been introduced formally, I audition him in my fantasies for a starring role, and can't quite bring myself to love him because I'm too embarrassed that I love him.  Perhaps it's this way because I think I know him already, and this is how we say hello, Dave and I.

This is how we say hello, arms dropped to our sides, foreheads touching, replacing the common niceties of regular exchange with something embedded in the matrix of our cells.  What am I doing here?  I'm here because it's winter.  What are you doing here?

He nudges my head with his, the shy politeness of an expectation met, and how it yields to that which gets buried in snow.  I can't explain the magic of this night, he seems to say, and I seem to agree, although I do nothing, but wait.

We could never work together.  We could never take the stage together, we could never look into the eyes of one another and sing verses I'd written for someone else.  I creep my fingers down the ridge of his spine, feeling him respond to my exploration of his vertebrae, and think in echoes a thought which chills me.

But.

I.

Could.

Make.

Him.

Mine.

Up.

There.

He sighs, almost girlish, and rolls to an elbow.

"I love the snow."

I can smell the grime in the paint, four inches from my nose.  His shirt is wet, and lifeless.  It clings to my hand and falls heavy against his ribs.  I would have never forgotten who I was, unless in this moment, surrounded by a winter of infinite blackness, and knowing the light will never change.  But try explaining to someone that you've forgotten who you are.  It's as futile as it is impossible, to compare two completely foreign entities and the slipping memories of each.

His smile is wide, and almost cartoonish, when I tell him my intention.  It hovers beneath the weight of his nose, somehow both commanding and comical at once.

"I want to kiss you."

"Then do it," he urges, and I see the shape of his mouth twitch in anticipation; a small motion, maybe flirtatious and maybe threatening.

His hair feels sticky and tangled in my fists, and his fingers run elegant through mine, slipping dry and ancient to sweep the floor below.  We're living records, he and I, of all the things we killed to get here.  As vicious as animals, relentless and demanding, he writes his history across my neck with his tongue.

Once upon a time...

Dear Magnolia

I left what I knew and ended up somewhere warm again, where the smell of the rain on the street is foreign and incomplete.  Bonnie compared herself to the light in the room again, and I'm starting to think it's a reflex, disguised as an excuse.

Friday, Clyde took us all to Cairo as an exercise in a lack of self-control.  I ended up living there, I ended up working there, I ended up haunting the places it's walls meet corners, all different versions of myself struggling for air in thick darkness, smooth like the water of him.  It wasn't until then I remembered there was a reason I left.  There are some versions of who I am I don't feel like confronting anymore, but the past is that way; wave after wave of what it takes to confront the present.

So what would that mean, when someone consistently says they're the light in the room?  I can't think of anything but the insubstantial quality it means to be made non-existent, but if there was anywhere to do that and do it well, it would be Cairo.

Cairo is the first place Adam took me, when I came home.  I asked him to guess where I'd like to go on vacation, and he brought me to this same place, to the hotel room Bonnie and Clyde wasted their adolescence in.  It was day there, when we went.  In fact, the sun was rising swollen and gold, and I remember he looked so young.  It was the first time he'd said out loud that he'd asked Clyde's advice about a girl.  That I'd told him to do something romantic, and he'd employed the help of his brother, younger by six years, to tell him how to be romantic.

I think he'd intended to make himself sound stodgy and too old for me, but it had the reverse affect.  Bonnie and Clyde became the huge shadows of two ancient lovers whom we were shakily setting off in the direction of, capturing their news clippings, and hoping to fall in love like they were some day.  I remember our agreement to not become something we feared becoming; something dangerous and festering about love we could both feel on the edge of our awareness, there.  I was bitter we weren't, and fearful we would be, and I could see the same in his eyes.

How are two people supposed to fall in love, when they're meant to fall in love?  Adam had asked Clyde, his hand rubbing pathetically the back of his neck in dismay.  He didn't want to love me, but knew he was going to anyway, knew he already did, knew our bed was a flytrap and my tears were all crocodile.  How do you fall in love when you're built for only that, Clyde?  And Clyde had told him, Cairo knows how.

Whatever judgment Adam had always had for Clyde and his pursuit of Bonnie until then I like to think was smashed in a moment.  Smashed like a bomb landing on the delicate stones built of sand and rock from the worlds before this one.  Smashed into the pieces of a house destroyed centuries ago, through which he could always see himself looking, in dismay, and maybe sometimes in hope.

In our solitudes, we never wanted to be lovers. I never wanted to be with anyone, because it inspired in me a sense of devotion to something I knew didn't exist.  Devotion to Adam, and how it would consume me, and me alone.  How it would turn me into something needful.  How, once acknowledged, such a crack in my soul would widen, and devour anything which came close to it.  I think he was afraid of something similar.  That once he fell in love, he would cease to exist and become instead something which lived as a function of me.  My biographer, my resident ghost, and my handbag.

Postcard from Cairo reads:

Adam-

There's a place all things come to an end.
Funny to find yourself in it.
Mayday, mayday, mayday.
I want you now, and always.

-Evelyn

Dear Joe/Homecoming Five

Joe,

When I was a girl, when the Dragon had company over, he would set out glass dishes of pastel pillow mints.  They had a strange powdery texture that would dissolve on your tongue with a taste and feeling equally delicate.  That's what I can taste as I write this to you.

The last time I dreamed about you, we were alone together, driving toward the setting sun, and it was so huge and swollen, it was burning the land that it was fast approaching.  I knew you were young, and the air coming into the car was cool and light the way summer feels when you're sixteen.  I thought if we were sixteen when the garden burned, maybe it was more like that - me riding with you in your car, the windows down, the summer wind blowing our hair back while we laughed at the idea of a world ending.

The truth is, I don't know what I'm doing anymore.  But I pretended to for as long as I could.  Come to think of it, I don't really know why I did that.  Maybe it was instinctive.

This is for you.

The Daily Planet

When I wake up next to you, I'm a girl and you're a man.  The paper lays strewn on the ground beside the hotel bed, and I pick up the front page.  The paper is the Daily Planet, and it reads like nothing ever ends.  There was a crackdown on jewel thieves in the Diamond District.  The weather is going to be sunny.  The world is never going to end, and the sun is going to rise on every beautiful morning.  The Daily Planet knows I'm afraid to die, and doesn't care to remind me.

If music could kill, my death will be at the hands of Mark Hollis.  I hope heaven is this way.  I hope heaven is disappearing into the mild newspapers of the world to the sounds of The Colour of Spring.  But all that wish means, is that I'm a girl, and you're a man.  That you make the colors of glass I press my fingers to, desperate, in the rain.  We might never understand one another.  Love is perhaps formed in the fire of the attempt.

Temple, Mosque, Church

What I understand about you is a translucent charade you insist on letting me watch; a creature of unknown origin, learning to wear the clothes of a human.  It's translucent for everyone; the loose way you wear humanity, and jealousy, and sex.  You pretend it's simple, but you let your black space shine out from the gaps of your exterior, out from dark places in your eyes.

What I understand about you is that two things are universal; desire, and religion.  That your desire drove something to give way for your existence, and it was what pushed us together hard enough to split most of this world into what is, and what isn't.  What is made, and what makes.  The math is simple, and you count it for me in short breaths.  A man who exists, wants.  I'm everything he wants.

In Our Talons

I whisper to you while I strip for you all the secrets I have, being a dragon and a girl.  That nothing can ever die, not even the men who long for it, their bodies destroyed.  That the world is frozen in place from my fear and will never unfreeze until I command it safe to do so.  That I hold this world on a red string, turning it to make the snow fall.  That I kinda like it here, and people are mostly nice to me.  That we're birds who can hold our breath underwater....forever.

Hej, Me I'm Light

I'm the sun, swallowed down the throat of a sparrow.  I can bewitch people into touching it, that sun.  They never like it, but you might.  Just as no one likes your ghost strings, your missed notes, your cobwebs of memory, your echo of namelessness.  The Simplicity vanishing together with The Contradiction.

In my chest is the same war-drum that called any Dragon with my same blood to destroy.  I listen for the throb in the bodies of all my brothers; those which unfurl slow as a flag, those which echo hollow and broken, and those which are dry as the creak of wood in the cold.  Mine is a quiet compression of wet muscle that erupts in a bloom small enough to be ignored, but heavy enough to call the others to some final resting place.

Valo tihkuu kaiken lapi

Adam says we create new languages every day, with all our new worlds.  If that's true, this is from the one where you're Joe and I meet you in a city, crashing into you one night to create the Earth itself.

There's a dark part of the city where the light gets colder than the light in Matthew's eyes.  It makes long corridors along the streets, which are wet with rain.  Brad took me there to show me where I got a flat tire and he met me in a diner as James Dean.  Drama lurks there, in every brick marked with the names of people you suppose will be real someday.

I come around the corner, in blue.  We crash, despite our bodies never touching.  This is a song where I'm saying happy birthday to you.  What was the day you were born?

The Rifle's Spiral

Because I was born, on Earth, I can die, and my fascination with my own body is only surpassed by everyone else's fascination with it.  Beauty is strange when it's beyond the control of anyone to be it or not be it.  I forget... the meaning so fast, I move beyond it.  It's this they love, Joe, this body.  Isn't that strange?  So I fill your hands with it, to tell me what that means.

Tell me why this matters, this arm, this nose, this hipbone.  It isn't mine, you know.  None of it was ever mine.  And it just won't last.

Your eyes are the color of the subway stations at night.  Your smile is the same as the sway of powerlines in the wind.  Your skin feels the same as the blank and empty air I'm sure is awaiting me at the top of my leap from this building.  If I get high enough, I will see the highways of diamonds stretching from here to anywhere, with nobody on them.

Forever in Blue Jeans

You put your hands gently around the candle, my laughter threatening it to a blue flicker.  You explain we must be fragile, to ensure human kindness.  The point of this body, is that it's going to die.  But what can we do against the torrent of darkness come to claim us?  What can we do but sit in the mire of what is known and unknown and observe, however clumsily, that they might be the same?

I ask you where you come up with this stuff, and you tell me Reader's Digest.

How Can You Really

It's 1978, and I go swimming in Crystal Lake with an American flag bikini on.  The water is cool and murky, and I get silty grime in my white hair, which floats around me like a cloud.  The sun is a light golden color, and Bonnie and I hitchhike back to the garage, a red-and-white striped terrycloth bathrobe covering me from the eyes of the trucker that picked us up.  Bonnie talks about Texas Chainsaw Massacre while we ride back, and I tell her I need to shave my legs before you come to pick me up.  I lay my white dress on the counter of the bathroom, and shower lake water off my skin, thinking nervously there's no way... there's no way I'm supposed to be here, because I already have a boyfriend, and a guy my boyfriend doesn't know about, and Adam at the garage, and maybe, baby, you oughtta slow down.

I think about what the Dragon, who is Joshua, is going to say when he finds out I'm not a virgin anymore.  And I bet the third girl, who doesn't have a name, is going to think I'm such a slut when she sees it's not Clyde taking me to prom.  Bonnie paints her brow into a perfect arch, and I know she's going alone on purpose, so she can make Brad jealous.

When you show up, my hair is uncurled and still wet from the shower, tied back from my face.  I'm wearing flat sandals and I don't think I put on any makeup.  Your blue shirt is too big and makes a square shape of your shoulders and torso, tucked loose into your white slacks.  You wait on the walkway, your car idling in the drive.

I Should Live in Salt

But no one really cares what that girl thinks, right?  No one cares what they think.

I could kill myself twice a day for the guilt I could feel if I looked at what anyone thinks - what everyone thinks.  And maybe once, I intended to do just that.  Once, maybe, it was my intention to bear the guilt of the world on myself.  Absolve all others of their responsibility by telling each mother who had no choice but let her child die that it was me who made her powerless.  That might have once been the war I wanted to fight; to take people chains with me to Hell.  I don't know why I thought that would work, really, except that people seem to want to believe it was me, and I'm easy to forgive.  I guess I have one of those faces.

As the catalyst for almost all forward movement, it's never been hard to find myself in the causes of a pain.  I could say... that I know something inside me trying to keep people safe from intentions and manipulations was what got in the way of a certain happiness for you.  I could say... I don't think I could see what mattered, and I emptied love from your life in a small bleeding knife wound.

I could say... I want your forgiveness.  But I don't.  I want you, instead.

Father Lucifer

The way that I'm smart or emotional or empathetic isn't warm.  It's mostly been isolating.  The way I'm nonsensical has never been charming; the way I'm flaky has never been endearing.  When I was little, I would put on my dresses and go outside to play in the mud.  My mother always thought this was something cute about the particular kind of tomboy I am, but it wasn't that.  It was the making of this album.  It was Lucy learning to dance for the devil himself, to bring him my secrets and hide them from everyone else.

Lucy learns fast to be a parrot.  She learns fast to be a ballerina.  She learns fast that one can say the same thing to someone in nine different ways, and to pray to Matthew and leave him seashells and keys and torn purses.  I remember the places I came from, and it might've been there.

Dead Hearts

But you believe me, don't you?

Midnight

Making this for you, and writing this letter to you, has turned into a long and variegated sexual fantasy for me.  Tonight, at midnight, I leave this for you at the crossroads, in an envelope I seal with a kiss-mark.  You listen to it alone, pushing back in different moments your hat to expose your forehead to the gathering moonlight.  I wonder if we're evil, in the sense of the inventors of the word.  If we are things that create fear from surpassing understanding, or feelings of safety.  I wonder, watching you from the bridge, if you're thinking that we're evil, too, in the same way.  If you think I'm evil, or surprising at all.

Tonight, you find this on your bed, and me next to it, asleep.  I wake up when you are most of the way through the first song, and we listen in silence; you, letting the papers this is written on fall in slips to the floor.  You read until the part about me being the sun, and then drop the rest of the letter to roll toward me and find my thighs with your lips.  There's a hundred things I want you to say to me that are secret, and as you slip into me, harder than I can remember you feeling before, you ask me to tell them to you, first.

Tonight, at midnight, I climb onto your lap and whisper to you there's no way we were ever, ever, made for one another, and that you're the opposite of me, and that there's no reason we should have ever met, or become lovers, or existed in the same place at all.  I'll whisper in your ear when you're cumming inside me, "No te conozco."

Blood Bank

I wait in the common room of the sanitarium, beneath a large painted arc of a rainbow, and wonder if there are children, here.  Children, even, here.  Children, anywhere.

"Some women were not made to bear," the doctor supposes at me.  I think instead about the children we've made together, from nothing but sadness and air and music.  I try to think of the sound of your voice, saying your favorite words, and I know I don't belong here.  There were limitations of my life that I was made to believe in, see, that you won't see.

Run

We take to the streets in your car, the air warm already, at dawn, heading for the ocean.

O I Long to Feel Your Arms Around Me

And the sun comes up, and the world will never end, and we are sixteen, and the newspapers are full of the kind of news that make the world feel informed and no longer fearful.  There are candles in the cemeteries, there are songs in the churches.

Wonderwall

This is our song.