Our souls are growing coarse. We must do something.

Let's colonize a median. Let's shoot our holes full of plans.

We can leave here as it rains, acid showers, hand in hand. We'll know the roots beneath our feet in the reflections of branches straining skywards over the puddle-strewn asphalt. Stretching to suck sustenance, from Earth or from Air. Coming up dry either way. We'll watch the passage of frenzied, shining ghosts, their star tendrils spinning in refraction off the raindrops as they haunt the roadways this way and that, in search of home. We'll have no need for umbrellas or ponchos. We'll have no need to hide in plastic.

The change will happen, like all changes. This time we'll take it in our hands and mold it as we wish. There will be the downtown, with its alchemy of panic, transmuting haste into profit according to equations of the unreal variety that only gods and machines can offer. Then there will be the abandoned lands with their supreme people, forced to make do with the waste products of the city's fanciful chain reaction. Then there will be the endless suburbs with their violent stench of despair seeping from wounds no layering of McMansion, megachurch bandage could ever cover over.

We will run the sidewalks til the sidewalks run out, and then we will run the roads as foreigners. We will run past farm fields, small town ruins, rural boutiques, lonely silos, abandoned semis, rusted leaking watertowers, desperate prayer circles, fast food clusterfucks, graveyards of burning crosses. We will run straight down the center of the highway. We will trip speed traps in our passion for escape.

"Let the warriors clamour after gods of blood and thunder," you will say.

"Love is hard, harder than steel and thrice as cruel," I will say.

"Could I see your identification," the officer will say, and call us by our first names. Like a friend.

I know you will find the perfect spot. I know it. A plot of land wrapped round by an entrance ramp. A median where we'll make our home. Nature bounded by man, roots walled in with concrete. It will be safer there, a middling haven between the blind wilderness and the omniscient urban wilds, untouched land, for decoration only. It will be safer there, guarded by a stream of cars that are not allowed to stop.

Because a charmed circle that everyone can step into rapidly loses its magic.

And if we are to be lies, we will be lies of our own making.

Quoted lines from Jaqueline Carey's Kushiel trilogy.

A hidden track on a damn corporate CD is shrink-wrapped and laced with crack. Four minutes of silence turned into eight years between us, and then you came back. I saw you on the corner of tenth and main, smoking a cigarrette, and you said:

A firetruck screamed by, stealing your voice to quench some random fire. We had fires of our own to extinguish.

You ran across the street —

— stopped traffic just to step across the gap.

Once you breached the threshold I knew nothing had changed. Eight years is how long it takes an infant to become a child; for adults, eight years is an hour. High school, college, and all the substitute living we do blurs together into three days: today, yesterday, and tomorrow. We live

an aesthetic style, 
    and occasionally a mode of behavior, 
which seeks to combine 
        Victorian elegance 
   and ornamentation 
with the clean lines of modern styles 
         and the reliability of modern technology.

You're thirty, writing poetry. And — who knew? — they're writing back, both all the ghosts you knew before and the publishers who can't keep you on the shelves. They're calling you the next Wilde. You buy a condo in San Francisco and send me invitations when you hold fancy parties. I keep the letters in a drawer in the kitchen of my apartment in New York and wonder when I jumped the shark.

In grad school, everything changes again. That's what they say. Becoming a professor is hard work. You find yourself having to specialize more and more. You have to take your best friends: Pound, Joyce, and even Nietzsche; you have to pull over and tell them, "Hey guys, I love your shit, for real, but you've got to get off my bus or else I'll run out of gas before I get to where I'm going." You have to shoot them in the back of the head when they try to come along for the ride, anyway.

And then, out of desperation, you take your lover and pawn him for your thesis; your dissertation is written in tears.

Mon dieu, n'y a-t-il pas de lumière plus brilliante?

This one's for you, sempai.