Did I tell you one of my favorite songs is Happiness Is An Option. She s taken to using a man s name, which changes like a chameleon in the foliage of her current intellectual concerns King Selassie, Artaud, Divine, David Bowie. On one side of the city, fire, on the other, fire. A shark s as good as an uncle s worth of lilies. She says whatever name she dies with, that s her real name.
Flamingoes don t really smile, of course.
In every village the children are tutored in numbers and shame, and are carefully carved on behalf of the carved elders. Some still learn in this that the stories science tells are always changing in the end, that there is no end to ending, that the chaste lilies enshrined in the kitchen window this morning can still make us happy for no reason. I close my eyes but worlds impose their ruckus in a fugitive braille. I feel my fingers mastered by multiple nights, the air burdened with jasmine in excess and charred steaks, and when I open my eyes the moon is always more than the moon. Ferocious sparrows are standing by, not quite able to solve their appetite in that fugitive braille the patterns of the flies make from the codes of a chronic hunger.