If you could hold the pool in a half-pan

Color pulse of youth energy consumption flows all through the dark, packet by packet, dangling camelback or elephant in a hat, orange and lavender and cream and teal and rust. It's happening between us on the most uncertain terms. In old age, coming on already, we'll wake early to look back on the nights.

If I held my hand up, palm out, moved it towards you. Your palm is opposite polarity, stops mine when close is close enough. Hereby is established the space between us, the cloak you're under when I'm around. It's the same space that divided the center of that room, divides me from what I want to be to you. Well, how scared are you of scared?

I slept an hour maybe, a little pool of dim sieving through my hands, and substituted with a portion, a potion on ice. The surf sound, the analog squelch, squeezes your pathology out of my brain, and the bass line shakes loose the cobwebs, lines up the words, sends them, chugchoochugchoo, blues style. If the train ran beneath my house, if I heard the whistle at night and it was all black and noise and butter-yellow light and the doors were sliding open under me. If it was a sleeper car, tropical canopy and crimson plush, if I could sculpt my dreams and if I could get downtown.

What is it you're hearing from me that you can't say back? Less to say, more to write, and again and again all night. What's this game we only acknowledge acknowledging? Visceral, sly, inverse to daylight? I think you know what I mean, but I just can't say the same for myself. Maybe none of it, maybe nothing. I can't begin to decipher such uncultivated unpredictability. But I know you, I want to know you, I know, you know.

Dear things that just don't work out in the morning: maybe you can beat the rap and maybe you can beat the rain, but you're here today and you can make it again. Quick, say it like a poem so you don't lose the words before you make it to the train. Honey, good words will come back, but not through your fingers and not before the five-ten.

You already wrote how the deco-letter beasts quiver in their stalls, humming and shining to run. How the suits cluster where the doors aren't yet, how the colors of vinyls shift from car to car, how even the commuters flinch at power out on the outbound underway. If I had Buffett's money I couldn't stop it, not while we've got Burlington-Northern-Sante Fe and all these places so far away.

They heard me singing and they told me to stop,
Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock
These days, my life, I feel it has no purpose,
But late at night the feelings swim to the surface
'Cause on the suburbs the city lights shine,
They're calling at me, "Come and find your kind"

Sometimes I wonder if the world's so small,
Then we can never get away from the sprawl
Living in the sprawl,
Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains
And there's no end in sight
I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights.
- Arcade Fire, "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)"