Easily, an arm slipping through a sleeve, the train slid through the morning.

A speeding spectrum of black against a lingering spectrum of white.

The morning had been waiting for it.

Trystan has baby green eyes, a permanent pout, skinny little arms, too much hair.  She lives in a tower of childhood.   She is innocent and she is old.  She is like a bad trip and a punch to the head.

Trystan wears dresses on the lawn, too-large hats and bare feet.   Trystan is Alice, Lolita, Peter Pan.  Trystan is every lonely summer, squeezed from childhood and placed in a tightly sealed jar of fireflies, the smell of camping and gas-stations, smores and your old bedroom, crumpled letters and clumsy handwriting, lanterns and a secluded corner of the woods.

Trystan is the sound of wind-chimes and opera and a baby who laughs a little too often.  She looks free.  She is not free.

when i was a bird, i lived everywhere.  in parking lots, on the roofs of old cars, across diluted summer skies in strip mall wonderlands.  old ladies would walk past me, mothers in faded jeans and hysterical children would use me as a distraction to shut them up.  i watched teenage boys hold their sweethearts, rebels spray their names on walls over and over, as if looking for an identity.  the road was long.

when night fell, i would try to find a place to rest.   usually on telephone lines, hoping that just by touching them, i'd be pulled into someone's late-night conversation, someone else's world.

I am surrounded by worried angels and their fine-toothed combs.

I wear a cloak of ill-conceived memories and a crown of bad notions.  The air is dead and in your ghost town, this is not surprising.

All is dove gray, peach, a blue-bag orchard.

I count the years of my childhood—one, two—they keep beat to my step.  My shoes do me no good here; the tar burns through the soles and careens up my calves, suburban lightning exposing my insides.  I am repulsive, I am resentful, I am the reflection of your fingers as you rub a strand of hair the wrong way.  "All those songs they wrote to save the world, it don't mean nothin' to you", a skinny musician croons.  I flatter you in my memory.  A drunken prom king.  A golden dog eating boredom for lunch.  Two toothless women, laughing with a pack of cigarettes.  I flatter you in my memory.  Three kids scraping sticks on a picket fence.   I flatter you.  I flatter you in my memory I think, and just like that, my skin begins to crumble.

You are raking my lightning.  I stomp the tears away.

Your house is last on your street, a cul-de-sac.  There we are.  There we are in that Jeep, the silent drive riddled with static.  There we are, a ten-dollar wedding in a nameless drought.  There we are, dancing under a sky that looks like old denim.  There we are, and your two-star affection is making me nostalgic and I turn away and I do not knock, I turn away.

I am surrounded by worried angels and their fine-toothed grins.

And there in acrid nothingness is I, the face of I, the need of I; the aching I, the nothing I; a portrait always searching for the bones and feather-white and all the windmills in your town.