Language is an undulating plane, verbs shoving mountains upward like so many middle fingers. The adverbs sink like aging glaciers, the clear blue crack of their shattering as they melt under the brutal beams of a neon sun is a sort of music that graces the land. The notes blur and bend with the breeze over jungles of nouns. They tumble over each other, producing their own thunderstorms and ambitions. Pronouns are lush and thick like rivers meandering like women at the yacht club where a dumb boy and a dumber me ran among the fireworks. I is fluffy, is chartreuse chenille and hot pink fleece. I tells stories in the shade of an understanding tree that recount the story of color from the perspective of a blind man. You is a mass of muscle and expectation and hope. We….I don’t talk about those bastards. But They..talk about a complex, red backed, many horned beast! It prowls the prairie looking for I’s to shred and dismember. Language is a world of plush pleasure, rich soil being recycled over and over by thirsty and verbose crops, and hunters of magnanimity.

Desire hangs inappropriate pictures of pencils on my aging walls, and evidence of knives on my porcelain wrist. I wear pink like a lanyard of honor to show there’s felt underneath my smooth, silken skin. Along the road to perdition, I dropped my glasses. Deftly, Deference picked them up and put them on. She said she could smell numbers. Spicy scent of 2, linger over us like the shrouded lingerie I wear that gets as close to my flesh as it can without ever touching me. I follow him from room to room, not the haunting he thought he was getting, but a personalized ghost nonetheless

Sooty clouds leak a fine dust that turns into sliding beds of black silt along the murmuring rivers of my mind. Rowing in one river is my husband, setting sail along the shores of my body, stopping in the inlets and the dive bars that are my eyes. In the next river, a poem sunbathes with a rubber ducky, drinking cough syrup. I always have loved the flavor of cough syrup and the slick scent of dry erase markers. On another riverbank, little Lisa penning novels in gingham dresses. The novels are in gingham. Lisa is in a shroud of loss. My memories ride rough shod over the rough volcanic landscape of my consciousness, periodically plummeting to their deaths in unseen lava tubes.

I wear an identity of glass like it was some sort of designer bag. All my ideas splatter like paint balls against the fluorescent spaces of my spiced up brain. The light lingers lovingly over my porcelain, ghostly skin. I match whatever environment I need to camouflage in by being transparent and thereby concealing the truest, bluest parts of me. In truth I hate it, but everyone tells me glass will be rare and valuable soon, so I better keep the cracking coat of clear concealer.

Patron saint of leprosy and lepidoptera, please pray for me. Your prayers are perfumed prettiness in the heavenly atelier of our most brilliant Lord and Savor. Who made the colors that coat our lives? Who inscribed code into our flesh and blood? None but Him, His hands soaked in liquid rainbows. My skin is getting old. My face is going viral. My face is a virus, a label I wear to hide my soul shivering in her thin blue shift, nipples cutting against the cold like diamonds. Faces are a contoured means to a flattened end in the catalog of human memory.