Sitting in a bar in the small hours while I wait for my train, four hours into my session and buzzing warm with Greg and Greg and the distractingly good-looking barmaid. But forget them, I already have because now in to the bar walks a Goddess, a real life walking Goddess. And she comes and sits right next to me. A deity talking to me! Am I even responding? Distracted by her eyes. Her eyes – they turn me. She is funny and interesting, I’m just a moth who wants to share her light. But my train! Don’t get any big ideas, they’re not gonna happen. I do not understand what it is I’ve done wrong. I can feel her drifting already. Come back in focus again. We talk on and I think she might even like me. And just as she takes my hand, just as she writes my number down, just as the drinks arrive, just as they play our favourite song, just as we dance dance dance: the barmaid calls out “this is your warning, four minute warning”. And panic sets in. Come on and let it out! I lean in and tell her I love her. She smiles, the most incredible smile, warm and understanding. She loves me too she says. She is all I need. I’d be crazy not to follow but I have to catch my train. Before she runs away from me, before she’s lost between the notes, we kiss and I feel my feet rising, ready to fly away but Mephistopheles is beneath, reaching up to grab me. You bit me, you bit me, and I want more. She looks back, I look back. Not just once. Not just twice. She is my centre when I spin away. Out of control. Because we seperate like ripples on a blank shore. The beat goes round and round.
And so this is for you Loni from Flagstaff, published in an obscure branch of the internet that you would never consider looking at. Written on the train with the one album I have left to keep me company, invading my thoughts. The only band that matters anyway. Passing out the desert, slowly the grass grows and clouds shield the sun and it rains and then it floods and it’s all so beautiful and I’m so glad to be here, and out the desert dry heat, but then… And now the suburbs and the peaks of Chicago come into view. A long way from Flagstaff now.