Last Words

Nothing ever lasts.

I wrote that in a song once.

Do you remember what it felt like to write with J? 

Yes, of course I do, don't ask stupid questions.

Remind me what it was.

Okay. He gave me space, he gave me air. He, a glass jar. I, an experiment. I used to ask him to play the same riff over and over and over again until his fingers cramped and he could play it in his sleep and his dreams probably played over the soundtrack of the same chords and pickings on a loop and he only had me to blame.

But he probably didn't. 

Yes, that's right. He was too many things to blame me. He was too much of a sound. Very pure like that. 

You wish for your collaborations to be that way. 

Yes. I wish for words to finally become tertiary because the work at hand is all. The work at hand has made your fingers so numb and contracted and twitching that all of your energy is spent begging them to work. There are words only if there must be.

Do you wish for the gods to descend?

They have no choice but to come down and fight.

Are you prepared?

For what?

To fight.

Well I'm here, aren't I?

That may be as prepared as you can ever be. 

And I have prepared the sacred battleground where mortal and eternal shall grapple.

Very good. So do you have any last words?

No. Yes.

Well, go ahead and say them.

O gods, if I must go, and I must, make it a poetic extermination appropriate for a conjurer of fire. O gods, if you are to extinguish me, use water. Of course, and here's the caveat, but you know this as well as I: Virginia took the textbook death. Conniving, brilliant mother of my soul, to leave me floppily slopping on living. So, o gods, find another stage picture of similar magnitude.

And Mother! How could you leave me with nothing but your words? I need you to speak to me but I cannot hear or I am hard of it. You know as well as I that my sensitivities, my nerves, as open as they are, are still enclosed in a cage, their vibrations deadened by the enclosure. How can I fight this fight without knowing? Did you?

See that? No answer. Always no answer.

They say that sometimes no answer is an answer.

I say that's stupid.

Anything else?

What?

Any other final words?

Yes. No. My throat hurts.