the zither player featuring no real zither player

And the silver bracelet dangled from the wrist like a limpid crescent crossing the powerlines of blood vessels, which coursed rivers of current through your very being like a power plant, illuminating your body and freeing you of the darkened ships of terror that wander like pirate ships through the blood, like viruses and bacterium.

When you bought the necklace you didn’t think of it as a gift, only as a mere token, but it became your wedding band to the spirit of light enveloping the very sun that shows us the moon in such replete detail as to make its presence felt within our lives on summer nights adorned with the gems of fireflies.

Now you wear the necklace as a bracelet and it fashions you from silver into gold, sweet queen of the Mississippi who captained riverboats and threw drunken thugs into the paddlewheel, you were so dead on.

Now you carry a six-shooter under your belt and heft its weight when you walk down the block, all that murderous power pressed into your hip like some kind of wicked daydream that has shown you the edge of murder without actually being there, that has shown you how death is love as well as life, the sad qualification of those of us who know too much about the way concealment works and the way that things are misinterpreted by people who do not know us very well. They thought I had a pistol, I only had a squirt gun.

And you protected me, laid down covering fire with sweet supple kisses across my brow that would make angels sing themselves into existence, those bejeweled creatures that always show up when we need them because they understand, those of us who have become too large for our respective roles, my angel.

In the South it was really hot. In the South they shot people for sport and called them accidents. Well we were wise and congradulated good shots but in our hearts reviled them, my little Southern queen from the last of the liberals, from the last of the lovers.

And eloquent drawings bespoke our cartoonish natures, the postures we adopted with cigarettes and smoking views that made other people cough, the kind of ideologies that you spit out were you ever to look down the barrel of a gun.

Tell me your work now, tell me what it is that you truly do when you are relaxing and doodling upon piles of paper the color of some monochrome sunset, the color that we dreamed into eternity with the pale vespers of our mind’s forfeiture, our dreams that became memories, our desires that became memories, and our memories that became us.