The sound of grey cloud cover no longer gets me down. Especially when we sit back in the rain and compare phosphorescence upon the treetops from all those cars jetting on past the house and on up to Canada. Only the cars heading to Canada pass our skyline, each one reaching out with their lights and tweaking us via the naked dripping limbs that stand like lone stories around us.

We pay attention to language, the five of us. Then eleven of us. The nineteen, twenty-seven connected strings trailing from within my old hair. I hear the words pass to my roots, and imagine flying back to Chicago and finding something newer than I found before, perhaps a blue egg tucked among yellow stalks in the twenty square-foot estuary located within long walking distance of my home.

My Home. Already the phrase dissolves, and as I look out at the grey cloud cover, its hidden brute, the dark thumps on my wide open eyes, and I realize its sound no longer hurts, even or especially when the old hairs pass words through.

I hear more repetition from friends than I hear inside myself, and the patterns settle like the jitter in a puddle as it follows itself and then hits mud, never realizing that goddamn, you haven't even hit the ocean yet. You're within a puddle, man, and you'll have to cycle again and then maybe again to make it on over to the huddle, the grave reservoir. Nothing more elegant than the ocean, which is actually why the sky agreed and rain falls.

The repetition from friends. When we tell ourselves, who are we trying to convince, and what are we trying to understand? Lately, I've become a talker, I tell one of the twenty-seven old hairs as I walk out across a land that begs me. It begs me, and I talk and talk and talk to my hairs just to stop hearing, just to enjoy love, just to empty the corridors to make room for that book, that book I'm going to read when I get back, then one I will write new new, the space I will restalk, the blue egg. Yes, I talk to empty the nest.

"You damn yourself," says a grey one. "You make your own damning."

And I don't speak down but up to the phosphorescence in the trees and the tips of each finger turns yellow and cold, dusts itself off for the plane. I want to say: I do not damn myself. But... I am a writer. A writer who can't imagine skin anymore. I will make and make and make and each time, a little sprig of green moss will bust out of an old pink house sitting on the land that begs me, and its green spongeness with be so green and spongy, so sprig and spritely, even as it tears up the roof. Nobody understands what damned means, least of all the believers.

Damned with blessing, the blessings you have to leave behind.

I want to sit on your lap forever. I want to buy a book with you. I want to rush back to Chicago because you are in this with me. I want to see you one last time & understand that you're not a monster. I want to parade down the street naked with you, maybe painted blue. I want to walk your back daily, if not with my feet, then my fingertips. I want to talk to you in person and not always on the phone. I want to throw plastic darts with you and watch them explode against a blank wall. I want to blow up animal balloons with you, and then pass them out to only adults (if children ask, we'll pat them on the shoulder and give them sharpies instead). I want you to decide that I was worth more to you, this time. I want to sleep on your couch and hear you yell at the cat in the morning. I want to send postcards back and forth with you and make up outrageous names for each other. I want us to both lift our faces to a 27-degree angle without agreeing outloud first. I want to be renewed by your voice and not just hear your repetitions. I would like it, it would be nice, would you think about, is it possible, how wrong to want you to take me along.

This sky that causes so much whining and mewling. This rain hard hit and dripping like rain. This green which begs and begs and begs and rides up through my limbs like infestation, an infestation that, for a change, makes one hurt. The old hairs you are pulling, twenty-seven hairs, sprouting like sky from my head. It makes me believe again, it is so bright and illumed by my (or your) passing love.

There are no ghosts in the world that compare to our own bodies.