If you show me Heaven, I will meet you there. -Blaqk Audio, "Stiff Kittens"

If
Distant sunrise,
You burn the hull
As white sails battle the horizon.
Dripping-amber perfect
Weighed down by blue you wait.

You
Can't unclench childish fingers
From damp wrinkled so-soft shirt.
I would wrap you in fog and breathe it in.
I would sink my teeth into your scalp
And dig thumbs into glinting eyes.

Show
bam-bam-bam
elevate me
bam blinding bam
did you see i saw
Do you understand?

Me
Lollipop-licking fairground girl
Filthy fingers, a fruitbasket of a place
How can the tigers scare me
When I have cotton candy,
Mommy?

Heaven
The Aztecs told me
I would be sacrificed,
Become a hummingbird,
Fly to the Sun.
I am looking for flowers.

I
Let's erase the monolith,
Tumble it down into blocks like river-stones.
Let's empty the pool
And make a stream.
Let's go swimming.

Will
Purple swirling past-perfect,
She thinks in video, and the screen keeps expanding.
The chattering voices and spit-shine mouths
Always out of sync.
When it happens, we will say it right.

Meet
Locked click our hands clasped
Did he just look at me as if he loved me?
Click, click, I can't let go.
From fourth to fifty-seventh street I loved you,
Sixty-two you took my hand.

You
And press my tongue across your lips
And hold your breastbone in the palm of my hand.
Hold me like an infant
Safe, safe, safe in the cushioned circle of your arms.
Damp cotton like shed feathers in my fists.

There.
Welcome to the place
Where the sun is beneath your toes,
To the place where you swim in seas of stars,
To the place where everyone sings lullabies,
To the couch at the end of the dead-end street.

It wasn't what either of them expected. They clung to each other in numb disbelief for a moment, darkness and music washing over them like a sudden rainstorm and leaving them speechless. Heaven wasn't supposed to be like this.

She had always known she was going to Hell. Why not? She hadn't once given a damn, not from the moment she spoke her first word ("no") until the moment she crashed her rattletrap pickup, drunk, stoned, and sleepless, into a pine tree on Elm Street. (Irony, eh? She was always one for irony.) But she'd never particularly cared. Heaven didn't sound like much fun anyway. Clouds, light, God… eh.

Killed in their bed by a falling pine tree. What a weird way to die. They'd known for years that the tree was unstable, but they couldn't convince the stodgy city planning commission to let them cut it down. And now they were stuck here in what looked for all the world (the sky? underground? where?) like a rave the size of a small island. There had to be some mistake. They had promised each other that whoever died first would wait for the other in a cottage by a stream in Heaven. Someplace where the Sun was always rising.

If she had been alive, she would have laughed until she spilled her drink at the idea of standing, light-drenched and dressed in white, on what appeared to be a cloud and cursing at the top of her lungs. But that's what she was doing, because this vast white place was obviously Hell. Her Hell was everyone else's Heaven. Oh, how fucking ironic. Obviously, someone up here had it in for her.

Muse- Supermassive Black Hole

They strode down the sidewalk as if they were engaged in a particularly violent tango. The woman's plain khaki skirt swayed with her hips and clung to her legs, trying desperately to become a flamenco dress and nearly succeeding. Her nails dug, glossy red with substitute blood, into one sleeve of the man's perfectly tailored charcoal suit. He stared straight ahead, stride determined and arm around her waist just firm enough to hurt.

They were reenacting a primeval mythical trope, the ageless conflict of hero and Amazon, warrior man and tiger woman. All mankind was caught up in the reenactment, really, going through the harsh and graceful motions of a dance choreographed by their subconscious. But these two were the only ones on the crazed, skyscraper-lined street to be nearing the denouement of the myth, and it ruled them, surrounded them, made them magnetic. Everyone they passed wanted them. But no one had them, either of them. Not yet.

Frustrated to the point of pain, you chew viciously on the end of your pen and glare javelins at the crossed-out page of absolute drivel you've just written. Mediocre, every word, every sentence, drab and shabby and doing no justice to the crashing and bubbling visions you're trying to let out of your aching head. You have absolutely no idea why your notebook isn't laughing at your utter, ridiculous helplessness.

Of course, you're still so startled that you send your pen flying across the room and let out a squeak when it does. It takes you a moment to realize that the laughter is too genuine, open, and musical to be coming from your stubborn bitch of a notebook. By the time he's kneeling next to you, pen in hand, asking, "Drop something?" and still chuckling, you've recovered your senses. But you lose them again a moment later in his smiling eyes and gently parted lips. What little frustration you had left floats away as he places the pen in your hand and wraps his tapered fingers around yours. Shakily, he guides your hand to draw a lopsided heart on the remainder of the page (platitudes, mediocrity, a badly drawn heart. You store it all for later.)

He's so cheesy and romantic that you shouldn't be able to stand him. But sometimes, like now, the badly drawn hearts and the breathy kisses brushed on your wrist are just what you need. Again, you let the pen slip out of your fingers, and again he picks it up. This time, the wobbly lines of a heart appear on the wrist he has been kissing. He raises an eyebrow and glances up at you. You gaze back, tender but unmoved. It's not enough. The pen-tip tickles your wrist again. You shiver; you don't need to glance down to know that his name has been traced onto your skin. "Write something for me," he whispers in your ear. His footsteps retreat, quick and even, from the room.

An early edit of the beginning of the second chapter of Tell Me A Story. Hopefully, it won't look much like this when I'm through with it.

"Once upon a time," he began (he always began with 'once upon a time,' not for lack of a better beginning, but as an incantation, a 'speak to me, muse,' a four-word portal to the world of stories. A wardrobe, a painting of a dragon-prowed ship, a pool in the forest.)

"Once upon a time, two boys lived in a strange and beautiful city far away from rain. One boy was warm, with a body full of angles and a soul of soft light, and the other cool, with a face that didn't make sense and a knack for extremes. They didn't have names—no one had a name in that city. No one needed one. Everyone spoke softly and in pairs, catching each other's attention with coy glances and subtle movements. In the perpetual hazy-dawn light, the city sounded always like a breathy-voiced woman murmuring sleepy nonsense as she awakes. People slept like cats in corners and on balconies, for fifteen minutes or an hour, then got up and went back to work without a movement of the sun or a shift in the blurred splashes of shadow. It was a city of shattered-glass butterfly wings with Faberge eggshells strewn in the streets. It was a city so delicate that it could flutter apart at any moment, that if the blinking-eyed barefoot people meandering aimlessly through its archways dared to reach his tapered fingers out, he could send a rainbow of scales down to nest in his hair....."

Written this winter; a revision.

I Wish I'd Never Let You out of That Drawer (or This Ain't Neverland, Darlin')

Something keeps snapping
Fourth-of-July fluorescent necklace
Green-beans-into-the-bowl
Perforated-paper snapping
Is it you or I, dear
Who keeps doll-joint popping?
Something between my shoulders jumps.

sweetest Shadow,
You are more beautiful than I

is it you, my dear
Pulling at my fingertips
Where we connect gouged-tabletop cold?

They're blunt pencils,
I could never stretch them
To make spirals out of strings

But the sick bone-cracking
when you pull, darling,
Makes something between my eyebrows clench.

I wish you everything
dear sweet Shadow
That my ten painted pencils
Are too blunt to grasp,
That my tendrils are too curled to reach
I have always been
Too swelling and too folded
To meet and fit together

I'll feel you whispering away
At sunset, when your legs are long
To wrap around a thousand lovers,
And your head
Higher than mine will ever stretch

I want to stop
The ears-on-an-airplane popping
When we pull against each other,
dearest Shadow