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burn down to cinders to prove his love for me. The beautiful marbled tiles, the intricate wooden panels, the luxurious carpeting, all mean nothing to him: these objects of crafted beauty are merely cotton and wool saturated with kerosene in his sore eyes. He places a matchstick in my hand, and guiding my small fist, strikes it against the side of a matchbox to watch it crackle into its horrible flame. Then he takes me by the elbow and leads me in a tango, a foxtrot, to the side of the building, the single flair of light the only illumination in the dark night. Hand in hand in lit match, we touch the side of the building with the tenderness of a vetrinarian, and he brings everyone inside of him to me.
    I lie in bed and he appears at my window like Jiminy Cricket. I try to smash him with my boot, then my sneakers, but to no avail, his abdomen doesn’t split open and spill its green guts like bugs would as he is not made of exoskeleton as insects are, but of real bone holding his flesh and helping his blood along the mad twisting paths of his fury.
    I do not subscribe to any of his infuriating doctrines and silly conspiracies, and I tell him that he is nothing to think such thoughts; and still he comes to my window in a deranged state. I tell him he is mad to act on his cancer, and still he shows up at my window as regular as heartache and Hallmark holidays. I tell myself that I am insane, total batshit, and am slowly slipping into a raving pit the size of the Antarctic peopled by every demon known to Bible folk, but still I fly even as I fear flight. I fight even as I fear pain and conflict. I fly with him, follow his crusades across a terrain of tedium that holds nothing true for me.
    I lie in bed and wait for someone to save me. Many show up but then they are just the people inside of him. A trick of light and night. And again, I’m flying and I’m fearing and I wish for the chartered seaplane, the magic carpet, the spread span of wings to fail and let us crash so hard to the earth, smash into the smallest roots of the tallest tree, and there we shall stay, there we shall make a little home away from the cranking madness of it all.
    2.
    So many lovers diseased and maimed. I have seen everyone of them somewhere before, a bright red despair in my guts. The sounds always sound better with the moon full of cancer, and white beasts crawl across the unanswerable extent of my urges: the one I chose was the one with the white eyelids that peeled off. That was the due, the dotted line above his eyeball and the tiny lifting flaps that facilitated such an easy peel.
    And should I choose wrongly, should I choose at all from among this bunch of rejects, castoffs: the young one with skin so saggy, his face lifts off like a rubber mask. The one with nipples ingrown to dank pits in his chest cavity, the ribs parted to let the rot sink in. The hayseed one with fingers and toes, pieces of nose, a whole ear, fallen off in a year’s worth of leprous fits. The old one with gangrenous opals for eyes, asbestos pipes for hands, and chipped new age crystals for a cock. Should I choose what I chose, I chose?
    He was the only one in the running. I was only running. My pick would have such white eyelids that flutter and fall off like the last petals on the last white flower at an outdoor wake; I chose a funeral in a bitter storm. What was left behind after the wilting and falling were the bitterest eyes. Like a corpse , my dear soon-to-be late father said, just like a corpse .
    My siblings tell me stories about how certain unfortunate folk meet their ends with their eyes open: fiery deaths in closed spaces, rat poison suicides, hypothermia, certain blood fevers borne by biting insects no smaller than the period which ends all our louched sentences. I join in to remind them: Jeanne D’Arc met her glorious end with her eyes wide open in rapturous quiver; and so did our Christ, in some stories and certain version of the Gospel, where it