Laurel Street. the beginning of a magic chant. Letter B, for best, great for the pride. Home of the native Chicago lions. Two years of secrets and we moved in just underneath the last sigh of worry. Surrounded by banks. Red-lettered banks, banks with trapezoidal vaults, banks with free drip coffee and lollies, banks with no lines but everybody's money; bank at the corner with the chimney from the world war, the one mom's dad came back and went to the basement to put his money in a copper box in the trapezoidal vault, a bank of the copper boxes. Freed from all the unions of our caretakers this was our first chance for flight- or free fall. One trip to the stone streets of the far East, and one weekend to see the vineyards during the off season in Napa. Then we lived in a stilted house on a steep hill surrounded by bare fruited palms; the deck we agreed that you wanted. The home that I needed you to have. Above my chair I wrapped black electric-tape to all the windows; no stray Cessna banner would lay an unwanted word on my eyes. We slapped ourselves to the California King and tuned out for a day and a half to The Smiths. In your walk-in you stripped off the robin's egg wallpaper and hung up your Dior, your cold feet trying on every **** pair you had while I sipped guava nectar in my other room chrysalis- eventually I bribed you away with my sticky bun. Two nights passed before you let me sit you in the Jaguar, I wanted to go to the landing at Half Moon Bay. We danced and waded in the high tide. Then you collected smoothed sea glass while I buried myself in Hughes trying to find the meaning of striding at the beach. You were in such a paralysis of anxious dizziness I barely understood. I wrapped you up with great giant arms, the arms that let us win the war, that brought me to you, the arms I found you with, and mixed me with you. And your lips lept at mine, you clang to me for life, for my life inside you, and enveloped my face in your hands, nursing you back to life with my breaths. For heaps of existence- anything to feel that awesome aliveness between us. Your heavy black heart turning hot white coal inside my arms. I made myself the popular Boeing engines, throttled my legs upwards, though slightly unbalanced, I shot us up, towards the nimbus in the sky. Then I watched you reassemble your loose parts, your parents, the nut-house, high school weighed your legs down. You were twenty one hands of horse, working so hard, shaking your new foal feet sturdy. When krrrbaang, our albumineous hare was swallowed up by dark and bursting storm thunder. It startled you, but also me. I saw how your swirls and your sea glass, your heavy gasping lever for pulling in love was struck out of you in one bang of thunderous sound. What clanging hell was this!

We escaped to our tiny two door, but once inside it was our fearsome lair, that place of us safe from thunder or lightning, hephalumps and woozels. The sky melted its tepid Summer day beneath, through all of its pillars of thunder and fistfuls of electricity. It lasted from Bay to Belmont, up the steps and until we were safe in our king bed. Each of us wrestled our wet clothes off our cooled hides, and fought for our share of the pull cover. Impaling each other, we collided until we found the perfect place of entwinement; quietly affirming with each other that we would never leave the mattress again. Dream maimed and anxious you only lasted so long supine.

The laundry. The kitchen dishes, our wet sheets, they all haunted you. A crisp agony befell you half of every day, daily afresh. Every morning a new trail of broken glass to carry you over, fear hung to your ears, dripped from your eyes and the limped down your nose. Weeks and weeks of you trying to convince us that you were always the poison. Like a ranting katydid sipping dark matter through a scotch glass you tried at every thing to quell your ticking nerves. But you continued to spin, like a mad sparrow always falling on itself in the sky. I tried every day to gather you up, but eventually you tore off your wings. And what good was I, I only made good of our arms, climbing up and down, bringing flesh flowers to nourish the nest, through the branches. What a waste I was! What did our rain dancing tide-bearing sea searches leave us with? Happiness for me, always. It sat staring at you through your window like a vagrant black dove, a crow, a penguin.---- I laid down beside you. I trembled over in my head, why you eventually sealed your veins. It puzzled me to my core. I wandered through many cities and sat through many lectures with my head bowed. Once I was two blocks from peeling back your mahogany box and screaming at you; but too close the tears obscured my sight from finding my way. If I had had to face our scenario again, to sit in that vanishing supernatural faded light that emanated from us, what I could come up with, all that I could make out, was you, there was and will always be you.