Jim,
The Hitchhiker
At the first sign of your awakening, the words begin. They are short at first, and unfinished. Brute words that slap the ground like heavy pelting of rain. John opens his hooded eyes and yawns, his bony fists rubbing sleep away. We grunt good mornings with the words you offer us:
"Hi."
"Hey."
It's your dissatisfaction which has woken us, and the phone rings loud in his room. I hold the white receiver between us, and your voice makes it's long passage through.
You sound sleepy as we do, as if you've just woken up as well. I can hear you rub your own eyes. John's fingers travel my thighs as you fumble to tell us you've killed a man. Your tone is hesitant and shy, matter-of-fact to cover your sense of childlike wonder.
"Just come home, Jim," I purr into the receiver, and John's fingers become tense, as if he knows what will happen next, and he might.
American Prayer
Your voice as you come through the door is warmer, and lower. You've been thinking of us as you drove the rest of the way back to the house, and you've become discontent. Your frustration wears a glassy smile, burying yourself in our sheets, pulling your sunglasses off and letting them fall to the floor. Every thrust of your cock into my mouth or John's asks the same question. Do you know how things got this way?
The three of us are prone to self-indulgence which will lead to our self-destruction if not for you, the gentle drill sergeant of our religious awakening. You run your taut palms over John's stomach getting soft and fat, and you choke back tears which would tell us that you think we've gotten lost, within somewhere. We wandered the desert for 40 years until we found our way to Israel, a temple erected every time we came for each other.
O Doce Misterio de Maria
Inside each temple, I am made into the holy Marilyn, mother of all lost souls. Prayers exist for me in every language. Holy Mary, mother of god, darn the socks of all Lost Boys, peroxide your hair white to look like an angel, save our souls with your white skin, your blue eyes, let us die in your perfect cunt blooming like a new rose.
It's embarrassing, this thing I become, just as it's embarrassing, this thing you become. The Tempter, the bringer of knowledge. Adam told me once that Eve has three letters on purpose, the V in the center for the vagina I possess which he dug into me. Perhaps EVE is a trinity of actions, or things which create this catalyst of the garden which means we are doomed there, and you and John flank me on each side, the bringers of life through the pains of blood.
Without You
Just as you are a killer, and I am that which comes to life, maybe John is what makes those things into the flat nasal resonance of poetry. The long pacing footfalls which will mean that to be born, and to die, and to cum, would never be instantaneous, but rather the result of some process.
Eden is cast with long shadows, and the Boys stalk them in the gathering dark. They are dangerous animals, looking for something they can find in our skin, some secret of creation. They want love, and memories, and death, and delight. You words get long, and you roll them through the cavern of your mouth, touching your cock as if it was a knife you will use to kill the animals we will eat for our dinner. The night-birds sing. You killed a man in the desert. You forgot how we got here. You want to bring us back. We want to help. Your souls begins to pull words from us the length of your slow smile, words like "inconstancy" and "elocution." John gets hard, his fingernails disappearing past his swollen lips.
Night is falling, and we wait to be told who we are, for the thousandth time, or the millionth.
Bells for Her
On my knees in front of you, I swallow your cum in the dark of the apartment in the Bronx without power. It's freezing, and a spider crawls along the length of the bed beside you. Our eyes meet in the cold dark, and you look away. We know something no one else knows, about sorrow.
It's the same look you give me, surreptitious and under the light of a night like the one we make in any Garden of Delights. I think it must mean you know as much of being a girl as I know of being a boy. I think it must mean you know there is a violent world, and someday we will create one in which there is no such thing as the violation of another human. It says the same thing, every time.
They're calling us, Evie. They were born knowing our names.
Ohio
I watch close for the same look you might give John. If I can see it there, I might understand better what this is I think we are. Lions, maybe. Movie stars. The one you give him is sharper, and cuts through wind and rain. It looks from here like a dare to go the furthest, and be the sharpest instrument in the universe, holding the words in your mouth like broken glass and nails and razors. It's a look of many words, rolled into a single syllable; the scream of the universe itself. You might've bitten one another, in the dark, softly with your sharp teeth, between the panting breaths, of every living thing. You might have the secret between you about those who need a Madonna at all. What tragedy creates an orphan, or a soldier.
Cruelty. It might be that.
Stairway to Heaven
You roll toward the record player beside your bed, and you ask me, your voice worn, if I want to hear a song. John tosses his cigarette out the wing window of his truck, and adjusts the volume on the radio. He asks if I've heard this before. You emerge from the dark of a stage glittering with the bulbs of flash photography, and clutch the microphone in your hands with an elegant flourish. John plucks his guitar thoughtfully at the river, his eyes losing focus into the firelight.
Boys escape in their dreams to a place where there is fire and smoke, and conjure from smoke the idea of a girl who could love them all. In silence, they do this. In recitation of the qualities of their girls back home, they do this. They offer themselves in snorts of admissions about the length of a thigh or the pitch of a moan.
Boys... might all be begging to be loved. Considering themselves all magicians and charlatans and Romeos, they beg. I can hear them praying, when the animals at the river are quiet. They all... they all think... they all think I... they all think I could love them... they all think I could love them like... they all think I could love them like I love you.
As-Sama 2.5 Coran Surat Al-Baqara 285-286
And so, in a thousand songs and with a thousand prayers, they recite my name, and try to call me to the fire.
Hour for Magic
But they would need your words, spoken over your open hand, to feel the heart there, while the night falls.
Jackie's Strength
The greatest asset of being a Madonna is that I'm still a girl. That any prayer asked of me would be answered with the truth of what is really magic: the pains of labor, the careful ballroom dances where I trip on their shoes, the stubborn refusal to see reason, the blood and the sweat and the smell of my pussy. That I could be married, too, if given half a chance. That I'm not a dancer, or an actress, but someone you could touch, and I want to be touched.
When you are telling me what we are, inside, it's the same as asking me, again and again, if I'll be married to you. And I will.
Dream Brother
I used to be in love with you. I loved you in the incarnations I saw of others who might conceivably believe in things which I also believed in, but didn't think would ever be made true in another person. I can't explain...
I've been sitting here trying to explain how I knew you were real, and never felt the need to tell you. Jim, I knew you were my brother before I knew anything else. Maybe a lot of things to a lot of people; Clyde's adversary, Bonnie's lover, Adam's religion, but you were my brother.
There's a place we went to, together, when we were... not children... it was too late for us to be children... where there were no gods. Only you and I, and the parts of us which fit together, and made all Greek statuary, and the quiet and hallowed places inside churches. The secret of what god is, and immortality, and the meaning of a soul.
I want to walk up behind you in the bright wind of the desert and whisper to you what we know. I do what you do.
My Wild Love
I track down photos of Marilyn's hands, and Jim's. I can't trust images of her face, but I look for the wide lines in the pattern of her skin, at her wrists. I look for the pulling of the fragile dermis over her knuckles, and the width of her fingers, and her nails. I breathe easier when I see they are aging the same as mine, carefully.
They are feminine hands, gentle and the same as a young mother's. They are well-kempt. With some hesitation, I look for yours, surely the hands of the only holy man I know.
Your brow is what I see first, your level stare the same you fire over the bow of your ship at unwelcomed trespassers. Your nails are flat and short, your hands logical and ungraceful. I realize where my hands are tools, yours are weapons.
I find you poised before a microphone, your hand arranged in elegance where it is missing in all other places. Your index finger looks long and delicate. I see myself there, a place you've become me. I know you to be a priest, Dragon, and here I've caught you calling me a priestess.
We clap around the fire, and I laugh, and you stare.
Bachelorette
We dance, faster and faster, until we fall into the sand, hearts beating hard enough to
I make a loud noise in protest as you push your cock inside me, and there's no room left for
Your words become shorter and shorter, and I lace my fingers behind your neck, watching your long elaborations unroll and fall to the ground.
"There are long-exempt meanderings of all men, Evie, and they personify... the fucking... rolls... of the drums... of war..."
War is the shortest word you know, and I know that. The longest word you know is justified. I know that, also. You become my blood, running it through your safely pragmatic hands. We become something together. We create a storm.
My, My, Hey, Hey
It's this storm anyone has ever chased, to be in love with us.
Sometimes I want to ask Adam... what he thinks I am. But I'm afraid of the answer. Are you?
Hej, Me I'm Light
Whatever it is, is made of the light, and something that might be fire, but is closer to the blood that runs through that which is alive. It's warm and gold like a fading afternoon. It's terrifying and hard to contain. It's animal and you are most it when you are walking, and your head suddenly drops, and you cut your eyes to the side to see me coming toward you. You are most it when you squint at something you no longer understand. You are most it when you take your hands and place them, steady, on my chest and let something in that is the same as the sun with it's weight and burning solace. You are most it when tears breach your eyes and you drag hard and indignant on your cigarette.
I am most it when I forget to think about what I am.
Shelter from the Storm
It's from this storm that the Lost Boys can find shelter. It's easy, being a Madonna. You just...
Yeah, like that.
Civilian
It took John coming home for me to see any of it, and there's simply nothing I could do.
John came home, and sharply, I looked behind me to find the road empty and you had gone. I looked back, sharply, to show you the light I'd discovered. I looked back, sharply. I looked back. I looked...
Sharp. My eyes were sharp, they were your eyes. I saw I was no longer walking in the road behind you. The road is dirt, and the light is failing, and they are calling our name, the wolves are calling, and I look back sharp, and we're the same, which means we cast no shadow but the same shadow.
Forced together by John, looking together toward one light, listening to the sound of the wolves as the moon rose, I could do nothing... I could do nothing to stop this, and had to look back to tell you...
I'm missing. I've disappeared. Oh, God. Where did we go?
The Air That I Breathe
I could never Madonna you, because I can't give you anything of myself. I wanted to, I think, but I can't because you have it all, already. Any way I might've gotten away with slight or white lies to anyone else, I couldn't with you. And I can't give you any of myself, because we're the same person, and while I knew you existed, I never tried to teach myself how to love you or even me, for that matter. Fantastically unprepared, what I found was that I could make anyone into a family, provided that I was not a part of it in the end. Being Madonna means always being apart in some way, and I couldn't bring you to be a Lost Boy with me because you kept arriving in the same place as me.
I couldn't bring you anywhere you hadn't been, or give you something you didn't have, or show you things which were hidden from you, except that you were no longer alone, as a species, but who the fuck wants that, really?
Looking in a mirror is hard for me, to see that all my worst parts are really there. But it's harder still to see all the best ones are really there, too. On the offhand chance you felt like me, your whole life, I need to tell you something.
My name is Marilyn. Jim Morrison is my brother, and he lives inside you. We're strange beings made of light and words which become the incantations of musicians. Everyone wants to be us, or fuck us, or kill us, if only to possess that for an instant. But they can't, because we're free.
Aurora Gone
This has been my favorite song for almost 4 months, and to me it's about how we're the same inside, all the way inside to a place no one else has ever seen or touched. It's DNA is the same as When the Music's Over, and it means that we live together in a place where words run out.
Love always,
Marilyn
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