In the gluttonous dark, stars carry on like they’re on a trashy talk show. Cool air painting everything black. I paint the world hot pink. Together, an erotic charge. Now he puts his hand, the paddle, his eternal boatness on my chest, and I restart like the old Windows 98 computer my parents owned before I knew deceit. I can’t yo-yo and philosophize at the same time. But I will tell you, as I Walk the Dog, that strange things prowl in the duplicitous dark. Desire, my fanged name, pain. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Glittery ghosts promenade in my hallways. One takes a lock of my hair “to remember your mortality by.” In the rage of my systematic ineptitude, a mountain range collapses from my heart into the greedy sea. My little box by the bay. My island of sugar miracles. I will love you always. My personal wolves hunt the horizon. They will bring the bones of twilight to me

My capacious curves captivate my hunter as he crests the dark, haunted with the howling of wolves. Somewhere a bad dream chases a man to the end of the Sidewalk. Another is caught in thorns and melancholy. But my man is here between my hips, marveling at the sweet, secret underside of my breasts and my generous thighs. He touches my fluffy core and a beam of blue light pierces my corneas, lighting the room like a computer lab. His body is rough, coarse, able and willing to do the math that frightens me. Eventually the sun will rise for the last time.

I was born among the granite, where ghosts hunt you from mirrors and the sea drops storms and babies on your doorstep. I want to go sledding on the accumulated sludge of my forgotten dreams. Oh to be a barbarian in this prim place of propriety! In my hair, a halo with thorns waiting for the right thought to bubble up. When it sees the trembling pink thought, the thorns will strike.

Unacceptable thorns line my private, licentious rose. My rose is a carnal red and her cardinal virtue is that she contains a world. Stars everywhere but in my eyes as I bring the toasted apocalypse into fruition. I used to live in a jar. Now I live in a cottage on the shores of Lake Forgetfulness. Roses are a language unto themselves. I cultivate roses because I cannot hold back the sea. The sea, for his part, clutches my windpipe.

Silky stars lay languidly over liquid space time. The waves are gigantic, but the stars bob along nonplussed. In one star, a cartographic adventure for the minute minutes that compose our lives like a symphony of laughter. In another, hell in all its fury. My fear is a feral, focused thing. It escapes fire only to be crushed by brimstone. I wish that I was a star beaming out over a thirsty universe. Instead, I am dark matter. I sever and shiver.

Gladly the marigolds smile into the first gentle breezes of Autumn. Angels watch me cavort in a field of four leaf clovers. Nature as vast tundra of self reflection. Nature as guilt and verdict. Nature as a mother possum, hissing at me as she brings her babies across the distant fence. Ignore the deer here. They badmouth me – gossips all of them. Autumn will find me older, aged like a hope and as lined as paper.

Under the fireworks I kiss him with my sensitivity and he sticks his longing down my tongue. All day the sky has been weeping, dreading the maniacal stabbing of fireworks that would pierce it. I wept with the sky, but he wiped away my tears with a newspaper article from 1988. The fact of his warm, strong body being here is some kind of miracle. His presence is wrapped up in dollar store wrapping paper, and I slice it open deftly with my eyes. I will give him the timeless chanting of my heart, echoing as it does in my spacious body.