Peasant

Because still there are traces of you in On the Ground--that one record always spinning, dizzying this marvelous circus-piano-hand mindset into the lashes of that boy's dark eyes. You told me he sang lullabies to his own perfect ears to put himself to sleep, and you were entirely, wholly enthralled, in love with the idea of it. So was I.

I sat on the floor, eating dry cereal and pulling, tugging open every window lining the square of my prison... in the middle of February, at that. That woodstove was a door to hell, he chimed, yet he was always bound in cotton sweaters and leather boots and strumming on some crimson strings. I'm practically Jesse Lacey, he would say, and I would smile and shake my skull and yank some more at the ventanas. Sheet music that he couldn't read fell defeated to the carpet and slept its days right there; I swallowed pretty oval opal pills and stacked a library in my bureau.

Buddy and Zooey and Franny and Seymour may have come to visit had I written them quite sooner. We both knew they're rather busy and their hair is most likely lovely and bright, glossy in its mirrored pages and tired in its decade times. He, the boy with the dark lashes, yes he had this way of crooning and grinning and shelving each of his past-lives as if he had not lived them. As if in each watch-click and eye-blink he was here to go and so was everything else. See we're all a little make-believe and we're all a bit of should-have-been. But I think that's the way it's supposed to be, really.