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Travelling Song

Jinki stands behind me on the balcony, playing with what remains of my hair. On the inside,I am purring, I think I know wwhat is coming. "This isn't a good idea." she tells me, as if I don't already know. We've already made love in every room of this apartment, many journeys ago, and then I said goodbye for the first time, and now my path has led me back to her door. Jinki's bed always lay comfortably close to the floor, in a house of pretension and beauty. Byron and Blake, and Bjork and Blue Vok, in a crystal ball vision of pefect pasts and futures to die for. We sold it all for the bright copper penny of lust, and her coin had become so cheao that it bought but a few scant moments, and she moved on, a traveller through all my lives, my spirit of the sea.... I was looking for a teacher, she for a toy. Some things have changed. I am now banished to the balcony to smoke, the chairs are swathed in calico, my little brother no longer visits.... I'm not staying long this time, I just stopped by to drop off a few thoughts and pick up a few memories that I left behind the last time I called myself her lover. And yes, I am seducing her again, apparently without even trying. This is the girl who likened me to Lindt Chocolate - far too good to have too often. I wish it were that simple. I have learned much from her, I now set her traps for others - wrap myself in walls of desire and deceit, and wait until some innocent stumbles my way. I never realised how irresistible a cloak of lies could be until I wore one of my own. I have fallen in love with the beauty of deceit - not that Jinki would have bothered lying to me, or I to any other, but there is a more fudamental falsehood at work here. We dare to defy others' hopes, we dare to say I Shall Not.

(The only sounds tonight are her scribblings, it's as if the wworld has suddenly stopped and we tw are alone, a blissful isolation of creation. The smallest diversion becomes an excuse for an epic, each grain of sand a universe begging to be played in. Creating alternate religions based on charity and resentment, and secret brotherhoods with magic passwords. Towering sets of giants' stairways, each step ten men high, leading maybe to castles in the sky, leading maybe to oblivion. Bleak ice-tundras stretching past horizons, swept by tribes of icetrolls, hunting and praying to unheard of gods beyond our ken. Delicately duelling noblemen a milion worlds away, in palaces almost as delicately wrought as her own. Great faces in the columns of the mansions of the gods themselves, scowling at each other down eternal corridors of empty time. Outside this window, who can say what universe may lie before us? Every lift of eyebrow now becomes a whole new life, a self we could have been, had we ever chosen other than we did. And faces with animals climbing up their sides, and waterfalls down cheeks, and torture written in eyeliner.)

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