J) Joshua Deets, Josie's vacation Far Away and J. Alfred Prufrock rockin' 'em, rolling 'em, and burning 'em nebulous up

Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and... oh, so mellow
-The Fantasticks

I know that I'm delusional but I wouldn't call her a ghost.

Just in case, let's call her a ghost.

Let's say I haven't smiled in months.

I know that I have smiled,

but

I'm not sure I know.

The sun's spectrum still tints the sky twice a day on schedule.

At night, before I fade into black, drag into black, fade into black

I turn on all the appliances and breathe deeply

to quell the voice of the ghost, saying my name.

The ghosts all know my name

All of 'em

spread out all over the map on the floor, on the wall, across the ceiling, in the sky

a blue light flickering inside, each star, a blue light flickering for somebody inside looking at all the stars of blue lights flickering, each star...

There are clouds, and above some of them, are clouds. “Sometimes I forget that there are stars,” I remember she said. She said, I remember, a lot. A little of it I remember. Embittered, I look to transingularly combine the past into a singular reflection. A ghost then, a recombinatrix of the past.

That is to say, I feel like I am my own prequel, and I look farther back, farther back still to find happiness. Only I'm old enough now where that happiest I remember being was when I was last least miserable. Black pots with stars on the bottom. Bursting out. The universe leaking, sick wet pools in its seat. Each star coughs for my attention.

Sometimes when the stars have gone dim in the night, they whisper memories to me. Walking and scattering chicken feed, at the base of the budding ivy.

Specters from the past are— their conceit confuses at first—
they re(create the world conceptually, I’m not sure I know a better way to put this. First my sexual slumming and then deeper, further back—
a conversation overheard by a red-headed old blue-eyed man. A cloud within a cloud: A festival of dust called Rock.

“Why do they say that? 'The One that got away?' I let 'em all get away?”

What spectrum distinguishes the light of the one compared to the countless others adotting the heavens of the look-back past?

I had got a text from my Ex's Mom. My ex in a wedding dress, which seemed to me made of the scaly skin of those who had gone before. “take care” she said. Take care is what people say to you when you've burned them enough that they can no longer be expected to give care. In retrospect its easy to ruin a life. My burns were innocuous. I was a star, young and made of light and so blind to everything but my own radiance that I got lost.

Everybody gets lost. I can almost smell the dust. The picture blurs. The old man spins around. His frizzy-red hair turning white, his wide white-blue eyes turning red, his wrinkle-white skin turning redder— what was it he said to us?

“The world is on fire and every solution short of Nirvana is like trying to whitewash a burning house.”

Then he sold us some weed.

Green smoke to ashes.

Dashboards to sand.

Whirlpools of dust at my feet in an oven of howling boys. A woman moans in my memory. Long nights walking through green streets with my feet in the stars, before my time. Waiting for the fat young breasts of truth to hit me show me their milky way.

He sold us some weed and the stars turned into connect-the-dots and I woke up 4 years later.

Is this floor really stone or is it an illusion? I wake ready to leave when a woman moans in my ear, men yell on the TV on the radio, we boys howled, starving, hysterical, dressed in Abercrombie and armed with only our pantless weaknesses.

Frequencies fade. Luminosity dims. It is dark and I’m delusional and the face is hazy, the voice is soft, but I would not call her a ghost.

Just in case, let’s call her a ghost. All them ghosts, those faces in books. Let's read new magazines about old people and update our outdated statuses.

We are communal unto death. It is the death of us. I would have been alone if I had my way. My way was alone, I said, as my friends slowly communed themselves off into blessed unions. It rained and the dust settled and then the stars came out through the clouds.

Through the clouds a high hot young moon, with a shiny pimpled face reflects on our follies with biting satire.

How old I must seem then I don't know.

I don't know how old I must seem

but

I'm not sure I don't know.

Let's say it is cold and I am alone, camping out under the heavens, with the ghost. I would be alone if it wasn't for heaven. I am the ghost. I haven't smiled for--
An old song comes on, past its time, I stare off across the flowers no one sees toward the canyon with the ghost, alone, wondering if she alone is with me.

Twin notes, harmonizing high and low octaves, fading stars stuck in the same orbit, their story you know, you remember that old song...

There is the ghost. I reach out. She is cold, frozen in time, the way I remember her.