Follow me doesn't have much of a ring to it, though god knows
there's music for a fifteen year old girl holding tasteless blueberry cotton
candy on an August afternoon and flirting with a gap-toothed carny, arms brown
as twisted rattan, hard thighs in jeans black as grease, jack o'lantern smile
below a thief's indigo eyes. Music likewise for a woman, shivering in the air
conditioning and half having to piss, seated years afterward bare-legged and
squirming upon a gray leather banquette lit by dim cobalt sconce lights, her
reflection and the candle's weaving together in the Art Deco mirror, its
woodwork burnished like the luscious brown arm of one of Gauguin's sleepy
girls, yellow arabesques across her full breasts.
"Follow me."
A girl will leave stale candy for a hard man running a whirly ride or slip out
of her arabesques for a priestly man with grey flecked temples. See him swirl
Petit Syrah in a crystal globe before a candle, the wine's leggy shadows
dancing garnet on the dark blue veins of his manicured fingers, each nail
square and white as the sail of a Dutch schooner. Even here and after so long
she can still smell oil and the burnt sugar of the midway, the sweet dazzle of
aftershave.
Follow me before the choices disappear.
It is not the season for love, however, thin blue snow in the air, distant
carols. There's a rumor someone drowned in the river. The evening star is icy
phosphor. You'll be doing alright with your Christmas of white but I'll have a
blue, blue, blue
Follow me? What choice do we have but love, what season after?