Malicious, sloppy rumors roll over the undulating landscape of public opinion. The topographic map of regret is filled with many bulls eyes. My name was hauled out of mud and dropped into ash. My ambitions computate the beauty of a last sunrise before the sun begins to follow me everywhere, the light burrowing into my dreams. I used to hide from monsters in the dark. Now I follow them in bondage under the reign of the infectious light. The human tongue is a wrecking ball with spikes.

My love and my lover are opposites. My love is a plump, juicy, neurotic thing encrusted in velvet and peridot. My lover is stony, imposing, a boat fighting currents deeper than fate. When I wake in the late, crumbly hours of a scrumptious morning, covered in a concealment of love and merriment from my unwashed mind to my perfect thighs, I dream of his love. Leaning over me, his love whispers a realm of goodness into future legacy. What binds us together is stronger than ocean and faster than light. In the evening we swap blood and ghost stories.

The nautilus shape of my indigo heart contains chamber after chamber of glowing ghosts, their scents trailing them like smoke. Ghosts of grace and hope. Grace swims like a flounder always away from me. Hope smokes hookah in a stained muumuu on the carousing beaches of my mediocre 30s. Some chambers grow roses, their red piercing my blueness, retrieving my innermost data from servers I sank in the ocean of omnivorous octopi. But the central chamber, perfect in its tiny finite nature, is the ozone of my being named Stony Place.

Seas of silty green glitter carry life like a gloat to the unexamined shores of the Present – a glittering desert of diamonds ruled by the worst of us wearing designer bags. The new life will sprout transparent like ghosts, but immovable like a disapproving father. It will reflect life, envy, wealth, inexperience.  New money aesthetic laid like a costume over a third world spiritual plane of poverty. We can all dance the Charleston and drink our grandmother’s wine, but our prayers bounce among our children like deflated balloons and  the rent has come due on our bodies and we have nothing but glitter and smoke.

Time is seldom sober, and he trips a lot. He tried to pick me up in a bar once, and I told him I had a boyfriend. He didn’t know the boyfriend was poetry, but silence is sweet like fudge. Now, Time loops over my arms in an embrace, pulling me from my quaint little dollhouse – and I tell him I’m not interested. He slides his slick tongue in my ear, licking my discontinued brain, and whispers, “ I have my way with all of you eventually.” Gradually, the dollhouse recedes as I enter a place where Time is meaningless.