22 January

Simon.

It is 8 degrees out…. 8

And it is clear as black crystal and there is a golden Cheshire, grinning moon slung low in the diaphanous sky.

And I feel tonight I could hold my hand out before me, and magic would just float off the ends of my fingers, coloring the blank canvas air before me like finger paints.

Delicate and bold, I will slash the sky with color. Beauty for nothingness. Music for silence.

I will carve me words out of the very atmosphere, phrases stamped into the incorporeal air, so that when you walk you would have to pass through the ghosts of words like love and promise and glimpse and olivine. So that as you turned your head you would be swathed in poems, robed in lyric, and draped with the richest, most luminous prose.

And darling, tonight; when this green and marbled world turns in silence and dark, when time stretches out thin and starlit; tonight, I will build us a castle of obsidian thought. Brilliant and invisible will be the walls, mighty elegance in the stone, brick upon brick, and

the night will crash upon our defenses like a raging tide, and we inside will smile our small smiles and feel our enormous hearts and clasp our warm hands and watch as everything dissipates into splashes of wonder at what we have built.

Tonight, I will hew us a ship, made of scarlet possibility, its sails will I weave of my very tissue and fibre, bending and stitching and gathering together every infintessimal particle of the endless unknown, and it will be cobbled together of bone and pitched with marrow, until all the infinity of the future is spliced into ourselves so deeply there is no distinguishing it from us. We will be everything. Everywhere. Allwhens.

And this night we sail. Blue herons, phosphorescent in the sea of black sky, over the sleeping, dreaming world, and we – only we alone – roman candles exploding.