watermeloncholiac

you are a fool for the figures of beauty. walk the painted line, walk for painted love, watch your heels sinking into flaking facades. you will try to write the saddest words, rearrange them in chemical disarray; learn, draw your distance, for honesty is still your greatest weakness. but if you keep on moving, you will feel yourself breathing- and that will do, for the time being.

To some level I was always your sinless survivor, thrust heartfirst by amateurish palms. The dull tapping on your bonnet that reminds you again of children's tales. Like before, I had stolen your tongue, coiled your vocal cords around my ring finger between old silver and worn bone, and wrote songs in minor keys about other people's lives, and other people's obsessions. That day the earth completed, I found some quiet beauty (curled around my fingertips with her's) of immovable, obsidian grace, and smoky perfumes borne of a liquid haze. Under lighter nights, her reflection calls back with the curled lips of the nymph-girl, St

I took a black and white photo of you not so long ago, and since then your ghost has faded into memory, into grain and rust, slipping through the cartier-bressons, their humble sepulchre too grey for your skin, yet elusive, lightfooting further afield, with the mapplethorpes strewn bare at your feet, wrung by your ankles. your image still lies, unfolded, dog-eared like an old journal page with coffee stains intact, and I'm still searching for your face.

I had no answers when they asked, grinned back through heavy haze because I honestly did not know. Smokeghost visitings, strong ephemeral hands, twice now. I could not be held upright. And I said then that I could live forever in fifteen minutes, and I still could- give me a smokeless room, Dylan, a clove cigarette. Just long enough for a third playthrough of tangled up in blue. I am still collecting cuttings and trash, to find something with sense, scrawled there on the handle, in a dire need of clairvoyance, to slip under the door, before it sinks past.

Roland Barthes said, "Death of the Author," and society said, "Hey, why not?" They didn't actually kill them, and it wasn't just the authors, either, though there isn't much written about the artists in those early days. The theory was to pretend that there was no author, to better separate the text from the experiences of the writer. Of course, that's impossible to enforce. So society went the other way. If they couldn't separate the author's experience from the text, they'd separate the author from experience. It worked well, at first. What author or artist wouldn't leap at the chance to live in a commune full of no one but other artists