Love Story

When she met him, he was a foreigner in his own body, looking for a familiar address but finding only the litter of symbolic acts, the tenement squalor of gestures so grand they crowded out anything as simple as numbered streets. He had put himself beyond the law, insisting on the right to grovel at the feet of whatever desire he elected to rule him. In the Congress of Lusts, he broke tie votes by striking his own chest; if the sound was hollow, he voted, Yes.

She needed him. He was a pirate on the high seas of her delight. If the unpredictable geography of his desires and his griefs occasionally became too terrible, she acknowledged the value of terror; she knew, better than he, how terror is mirror to innocence. The soiled silks of his imagination notwithstanding, she was comfortable in his bed, and in his heart. Impaled on the twin horns of his passion and his uncertainty, she reached between to touch the one true eye of his deliverance — and so awakened him, to all that was cruel in him, and beautiful.

The Last Cowboy

The last psychedelic cowboy believed in America until the frontier shrank to the size of a pill and he was forced to swallow it.