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?