081413 #worm The blond boy takes flight. Him takes flight. All the leaves on all the trees take flight, and seeing them fled, so follow all the leaves all over the ground. The breasts of the woodlands lie bare. The boats in the boat graveyards fly away. The moon and all her craters fly. The salt and pepper shakers fly, leaving comets' tails of glittering white and grey-black. Me wakes up sitting at an oaken roll-top desk. Me wakes up in front of a larger-than-life-sized painting. Me wakes up covered in blood. Me wakes up trying to band-aid a mortal flesh wound. It's not going to work, little bunny. Me darts left, dashes right, searches thtough the faltering manicures of eternal urban backyards for the hole in the hedge, the secret gate to the pinhole garden, the laundry chute, the curvy slide, the fire escape, the garret in the arching manor house. Not so fast, little bunny. Me wakes up in the hospital. An orderly in pink garden clogs insists the clock is working fine. Me can plainly see, the clock is stopped. Me fails the tests. Me feels the restraints. Him vouches for Me, and they let Me go. Me has nowhere to go, so he bounds around the universal landscape, arm in arm with Him. But Him takes flight. The little blond-haired boy steals out into the garden late at night. The dog has killed the bunny; ripped its throat into a million strands of unmusical gore. That's what dogs do. Isn't it? Me doesn't know. Me wakes up in front of a bus. The bus, the bus: barometer of Me's deepest passions. when in the winter of a graying city's hovering despair a bus jams by, its jam-packed denizens seem destined for a grisly fate. Filled to capacity with emptiness, the bus keens on in a diesel tune that torments the emptiness shrouding Me's carcass. The window across the street glows, chestnut-warm. Blind snowflakes slice the air in front of that forbidden golden section. The bus, barometer: remember in the city's lanky, downhill summer, when the bus banked around a sunny schoolday afternoon? Remember how its raucous creaks and strains sounded in your ears exactly like the music you told yourself you'd never forget? Didn't you follow that cacophonous, polyamorous music out onto the semi-sea-worthy planks of your old, battered, green front porch--the park bench grows more chipped-green every year--and didn't you sit down in the swing your grandma's grandma's second cousin's ever-lovin officer brought back for her from the battlefields of original wonder?