My Kingdom for a Murmur of Fanfare

It’s common to live properly, to pretend you don’t feel heat or grief: wave nightly at Miss Fugue and Mister Goggles before diving into your nightcap, before reading yourself a bedtime story or watching your beloved sink to the bottom of a lake and noting his absence in your log. The next day you drop his clothes off at Goodwill like a sack of mail from a warplane then hobble back to your hovel like a knight moving only in L s. It is comfortable to be alive this way, especially now, but it makes you so vulnerable to shock — you ignore the mortgage and find a falconer’s glove in your yard, whole hand still inside. Or you arrive home after a long day to discover your children have grown suddenly hideous and unlovable. What I’m trying to say is I think it’s okay to accelerate around corners, to grunt back at the mailman and swallow all your laundry quarters. So much of everything is dumb baffle: water puts out fire, my diseases can become your diseases, and two hounds will fight over a feather because feathers are strange. All I want is to finally take off my cowboy hat and show you my jeweled horns. If we slow dance I will ask you not to tug on them but secretly I will want that very much.