Memory

     is  the birth of cool, it is rapture and ignominious spokesmanship unearthed. Packed into a slatted-wood crate, milking the obsession from cash-toting hands. Freeing itself from your bottom lip while life ticks itself away on a digital stock-exchange display. I am down and you are up, and you save pennies while I search for Chrysanthemums and vanilla-scented candles. Scent is my fifth grade spaceship,
     I hide it in my pocket and take it into the forest when the week is over. Adventure is the part of our story that's caught in between complaining about money and having clean sheets. Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday my hands mend themselves back from bleach, their crevices cave under bright lights, I go to the garden strip and put dirt on my face, over my shoulders, and on my back. I make a altimeter from an alarm clock, and worry what will happen if your feet should ever touch the ground.
Relief
     is a sarcophagus, the satiny silk chrysalis I weave into invincibility. I make myself a small child with a demon-proof lair, no one comes in, not even you.  I see

     how drugs take out your heart and put you anew, fresh: orange, pink, ultramarine. A wave is a soft gesture for twilight, a slow walk among the greying statue towers, bliss extracted from person to person tedium. How you exclaim about **** music as if your temple home was unfocused by jazz or synth-electro.
     I forgot your room of quiet had no bells, no hope, and no notes of resolve. Tragedy was the desert of your six to sixteen, while I made an opus out of crystal glasses and Cran-Raspberry jars. Then it was the relief, Neptune's hands on your *******, red dots of ecstasy connecting you to a higher vibration. You felt it was time to start exercising. I didn't **** you for modifying your perception of color, degrading in a salt pool- I didn't own your ****** it was just a place I went into to write.
    
    Three years later. I was growing backward, I was sixteen, making you the muse in my doorway, a James Bond goddess unraveling my fingers on her silky skin, except your golden crown was really a turban of snakes, and instead of silk I was groveling underneath you. That was the sweat that Ryan Shultz said I garbled up into two pedestal doves, I aimed by eyes straight at the city of gold, and then inside me shucked out every piece of self-respect and vitrified my spirit, castrating my lips and my tongue for something to come to or come at, he said I lived under pointed stars and that lying isn't a good way to get over past phases of silence.

     A few days ago, it all game back to me, in a random series of songs on an iTunes playlist. One memory from an isolated beach outside a strawberry patch near Santa Cruz, a second, two hands cupped over the ears, my face closing in on her smoothed-out pink bottom lip on an over-exagerated car ride to the San Francisco airport, and the third was the mention of non-vegan banana cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, a birthday I celebrated several years earlier. All of them in the coda.
    
     Verse four unbelievable. It caught me straying from the next stressor at hand. What's next? I move my cold hands from a keyboard versing strange relapse of mind, or I tear out another page, whip across town, and peel stamps onto a postcard to send.
     They were all tails from a memory. A slowing ghost that cooed at me from far away, beating me up and down, pulling my eyes away from a scent I continually tried to remember.

Marcy Shultz was a typist.
She typed and typed the day through
but never wrote a single thing.

Each morning she would drink her coffee
with a sunken ring at the base of the mug.

It was her good luck charm,
an assurance that at one point in one moment
someone had truly, honestly cared.

At noon she would salsa with the air,
knowing **** well that she would later devour it.

But the air knew nothing,
Thought nothing, just stood there.
Air is naïve, and she was alone.

At night she would shower with the blinds open
figuring if someone looked, someone cared.

But nobody ever looked, and Marcy never blushed.
She'd type little tales on her little laptop.
Typed little stories of little couples

walking dogs
kissing in park benches
laughing at rude jokes
eating tiramisu in little cafés
weaving stories of passers-by
carving initials in wood
waking up in the dead of night
to hear the rhythm of the other's breathing
before
holding each other's hands
and whispering softly in the light of the full moon
flooding in like spilt milk from the cracked window
saying,
"We are together now
and if a moment like this is happening,
then a moment apart is only imaginary."
Then,
always,
always,
always,

The little couples would make love.
Their moans bled through the window
like timeless cries over the milky moon.

The cats in the alley would circle about the songs
echoing loud from the little couple's little love.

Then always, always, always with frustration
Marcy Schultz would toss the tales and go to bed
and the couples would live on in crumpled paper.