My muses left me. Having worked overtime for years, they now sun themselves on a beach in Acapulco, drinking margaritas and laughing about how crazy my eyes were that one time they woke me at three in the morning with the poem about you. I didn’t think the joke was funny, but I wrote the poem anyway, because my muses are always on Mexico time, and when they want to talk, I don’t dare turn them away.
My muses are a barbaric bunch. Sometimes, they bite me in my sleep. “Keep dreaming, princess,” they mock, “and if we never come back again, you’ll know what happened.”
My muses take drugs so I don’t have to, psychedelic ones that makes the world look blue and purple. They paint rainbows around rocks and tell me things about how clouds smell. They can describe succinctly the taste of music at midnight.
I miss them, my muses. They make it easy to talk about you and what you do to my head when you step into a room. “Write about lava,” they say. So I fill my pages with fire.
My muses are shy about volcanos though. One of them was sacrificed in a former life. She weeps if I go into detail about the way it was when I was at the top of a volcanic wasteland, hating the scrubby bushes, thinking the forever barren, jagged stones were my heart without you. The wind whipped me with my hair that day, howling and punishing me, reminding me that the vast emptiness of me minus you is nothing short of sin.
I don’t know what to do without my muses. I imagine them waterskiing in Tahoe, and I get pissed off. Then I remember that one time I drove along the edge of an icy cliff there, having pressed my hand against your chest the night before, and decided, as I looked out over the crystal lake that it would be okay if I died. His heartbeat will sing me to sleep, I thought, and now, I think that every night.
I assume my muses are in love with you too. Maybe you are with them now, having a ménage à cent un. Whores. Listen to them chuckling about how my eyes go to a far away place when I look at you, Jupiter or Mars, flying up up up into the stars, kissing the sun with fevered lips because it looks like you. “She’s such a sap,” you tell my muses, and they nod. “Weak willed,” the muse with flame red hair replies, taking a drag of her cigarette, which she keeps always in a holder, Cruella DeVille style. But the bald one gets me. “Only when it comes rocks and rivers and frogs and firelies and you,” she says, touching that scar on your chin.
And you should believe her. She’s the only muse who’s seen my wings. She knows just what I love.
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