Look inside your head

After Waps' torn-off piece of yellow pad paper:

*

I would like to be the moon. I already see which mothers are tending to their sleeping first-borns, when I close my eyes. Only when I close my eyes. Because otherwise, it is my father I hear intoning from the next room: Do you not love me anymore? and then: the obligatory rustle of bed sheets. I have understood that the world makes the noises that matter most when it thinks no one is listening -- the butterfly-wing beat of the fingers of widows too sad; the sudden thunder of a car down the street, about to drive away; an abrupt lullaby; the inexplicable sadness of that widow, who may be too young, and her sleeping son. My father would chant, Love-Love-Love, and I know everything confounds him, especially those noises that matter most. Especially those.

I am the third son. My mother is sleeping. I can wake her up if I say, Mother, I would like to be the moon.

*

I would like to be the moon. Then, I no longer have to write about grown men leaning to kiss new blooms by leaves, about how I can never spell obsession right the first time, about how that girl I fell in step with on the street happens to write too -- that just last night, she sat with the man whose name she was been writing on the margins of her books, and he asked her to Please, tell me a story, and she began, A year ago there was a girl who'd only been kissed twice, and the man held up his hand and said, Stop, and the girl looked at him, and she became quiet. I would like to be the moon because I only need to concern myself with pulling oceans and holding gazes, with men and with word -- none of which I know anything about, not really.