"I can't decide if you are a detective
or a pervert." She said, as if we were
characters in some demented David Lynch
movie and maybe we were.
Maybe we were responsible for the severed
ear in the grass of a suburban nightmare.
Or just investigating the removed body part
where insects had begun families in,
watching all the stages of life from maggots
to super flies. That ear, a possible homage
to the lost spirit of Van Gogh, where all the bad 
dreams he projected onto canvas were formed. 
Or, maybe, we'd descended tunnels of love that  
disappeared  inside brain cavities, resounding  
with echoes  of reverberating weapons of  mass 
percussion, cars,  on freshly repaved Maple Avenue 
streets.  Where we sat, parked, she in the passenger seat, 
innocence personified, and me behind the wheel, 
sensing her need to become more experienced, 
more like the shacked up whore I had spied through
closet door slats, and, she, my nascent love, 
not yet aware of her need to be debased and I said,
"What's the difference?" turning on the car
radio to maximum volume and the four wall to
wall speakers respond with a full  frontal sonic 
assault of the senses, Dead Wilbury's singing
Roy Orbison songs in a wide variety
of foreign languages, while, outside the vehicle,
a man named Frank and his gang of thieves, are
smearing the windows with spray paints and
the last thing we see is the man in black gesturing
with his ax for us to follow him to where
the blue bayou meets the inland empire,
that place where all the whores and pimps meet
after death, to warm their cold hands by gasoline
fed fires, in oil drums and ash cans, and we know
we can, as well, now that we have seen the light.


                            Alan Catlin