Where do you go when the lamp switch flips in the direction of darkness?

When Romulus scratches from beneath the ruins, or flies down in a hollowed bulb of burn-stained glass, like those stinging eyes you hear, like those burning sounds you see, like the crickets in the thickets that just aren’t there, and the air is electrified with these Hong Kong highways of thoughts.

Pink paper lanterns and bullets in school hall walls. Parked beneath a banana tree in the summer wind, wasps red like thinking, my dreams tangled in the sheets… penning novels with glowing crayons and soul blood. Such grandiose ideas are but a symptom. Where do you go?

When the questions arise, to take a dive, in a dirty downtown Vegas dawn, before a thread-like walk to the golden palace of pools, to swim in burning light. I can smell her on the train — her viridescent geometric dress, her perfume, her coconut shampoo, her lip stain — the angel of that high light wheel set to spin in the glassy blues of some radical night on Earth. But where did you go?

We cannot find you beneath the lights or crashing waves. No one can find you in the circus night down by the ocean. It’s that loud place you don’t really like, there are no friends in that green parrot bar bathroom stall. Stop writing on the walls. You’ll get in trouble for that, and we know you are used to trouble. Everyone will know when you go, when you go to the cell at Mile Marker end of light and day and time.

And you sit there like innocent evil at the drive-in of life, twisting the tales in your head, the forceful wringing of a white towel in some place of loneliness, the balcony on level 11 on the shores of Myrtle, and would you just kiss me like you mean it before I fall. Down into the sandcastles, pacing the walls of the gritty dungeon. I’ll be so down and buried — you’ll never know, where did I go.