some weird paradise

Time passes. A slow burning of hours under rain clouds and moonlight when silent things unfurl and rush for the sky.

A song designed to illicit an emotional melt down at the grocery store, smiling wetly at the man in the produce aisle clasping a cluster of tomatoes to his chest.

Jim Arnaud smashes batteries into the pink shell of his daughter’s CD player with the palm of his hand. He looks like one of those women on the shopping channel struggling to cut a tomato with a kitchen knife. This is the feeling of everything falling apart.

You and me shivering in decrepit jeans and woodsmoke sweatshirts. A little further apart than when we left and a little softer still.

We call on summer for the sake of nostalgia, because every heart flutters when they think of the way someone's skin smells in the grass. We were all so fucking beautiful.

Martinez’s score expresses cautious curiosity, a mimicking of Elkins’ wondrous description of 20th century New York where “all the corners of the earth are thrown together.”

I’m flushed head to toe, a catastrophe of silent questions.

You whipped through a wall of rain in Wyoming, cruising alongside a crescent of horses racing against the dark edge of cloud. Your heart was screaming.