I spend my whole life driving in cars with boys. Riding around town drinking in the white noise. Used to talk about where we are and where we go. Now we know, baby, now we know. I spent my whole life wasted in bars with boys. Singing in the old bars. Swinging with the old stars. Kissing in the blue dark. Playing pool and wild darts. Drunk and I am seeing stars. Playing Rock 'n' Roll, dancing in the loud noise. Mommy's Mercedes or Billy's pickup truck. Comes out late at night and baby picks me up. I come alive, alive. All he wants to do is party with his pretty baby. Come on baby, let's ride. Tell me all the things you wanna do. I heard that you like the bad girls, is that true? Just drive on and don't ever stop. Take that body downtown. Don't take me home again, take me to a new land. Sometimes I wanna give in, but I just have to go on. They say I'm wasting time, they said that I'm no good. Summer of my life, not doing what I should. Call me poison ivy 'cause I'm far from good. Pretty from afar, like a dark star. They think I'm dangerous, they think I'm really bad, I'm just making up for what I never had. Go out every night whenever I feel sad, oh, this drive-by love got me crazy like a drug.

"I'll stop wearing black when they invent a darker color!" There was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smoldering. She smiled slowly and, walking through her husband as if he were a ghost, shook hands looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips, and without turning around spoke to him in a soft, coarse voice: "If you want to be safe, go back to your tiny house - the night sky isn't for you. If you want to be torn apart, let's go and you will be broken open and devoured, set ablaze in my fire not leaving well dressed, in finely-threaded clothing that keeps out the cold. I will leave you naked and biting in the backseat. So, come to me, and be healed of the unbearable white and black of all that you are. I'll become a raging river, and spill myself upon your thoughts, can you love me under the starry sky, shaved and smooth, my skin like liquid moonlight?" Perception is everything and she drove him to distraction as he intimately pictured her in his dreams. She is the quintessential instinctual criatura and her style is her expression. Her style is a silent speech, a certain flow of mind-to-skin that must be understood. Black has it all, white too, their beauty is absolute. Her style is her sentiment, it's what she shares, it's those intimate words she shares every time she looks into the mirror or every time she looks at her photographs.

By night each thing creeps back into its own nature within the shelter of the dark and even the most commonplace and familiar objects take on another character. People group themselves differently, they draw closer together, as if in fear. But down there, at the carousel, the nights are bright and nobody believes in the Devil. Like a wheel of fortune, the carousel starts to spin. Step aboard and we will fly through the sky. Laughter illuminates the darkness. All over there lights were coming on in the purple-blue dusk. Colored lights blink on and off, racing across the deepening sky. Shadows follow, joyful, laughing sprites. Long twirling ribbons of light, red, green, violet, all flashing like fire. The street lights looked delicate and frail, as though they might suddenly float away from their lamp posts like balloons. Everything was beautiful. It was hard to tell which was real and which was a reflection, as if there were two displays, above and below, going on simultaneously. And the light-painted wagons go up and down. We're captive on the carousel of time. We can't return; we can only look behind from where we came. And go round and round and round in the circle game. The seasons change, things change, but the old carousel is always here. It reminds people of the good times.

I lie down on many a station platform; I squat on many a bench; the landscape glides past the waggon's windows with its villages, their thatched roofs like caps, pulled over the white-washed, half-timbered houses, its corn-fields, gleaming like mother-of-pearl in the slanting light, its orchards, its barns and old lime trees. It becomes disturbing, mysterious, and familiar. I stand at the rattling window and hold on to the frame. The train stamps and stamps onward. The names of the stations begin to take on meaning and my heart trembles. These names mark the boundaries of my youth. But youth is a baffling time. The present moment is nice but it does not last. Living in it is like waiting at a railway junction for the morning train; some day you will have to leave it and you do not know where the train will take you. Sooner or later you must move down an unknown road that leads beyond the range of the imagination, and the only certainty is that the trip has to be made. In this respect youth is exactly like old age; it's a time of waiting before a big trip to an unknown destination. The chief difference is that youth waits for the morning train and age waits for the night train.

"What have I become?" she asked in softly whispered tune while laying the unknown depths of her thoughts down beside her. Life has become lifeless and disheartening. In her hiding place, there is no soul to be smelled, not even a fowl in the air. The expanding deep sighs hurt the void within her, holding secrets that are withheld from others eyes. Only yesterdays sweeps upon the shores of her eyelids, refusing to let them shut. Not another sun shall rise that can't be seen. As her sight starts to fade to the colorless end of hues, so there on the dock in death's hands she waits for time to receive her, the black cloth upon her skin reluctant to the coldness of silent winds that brush against her shoulders in a sweeping manner. The sweetness of memories has been cast away within the ripples of the water. No longer are they soothing as the salt from her gaze stream like fire down the high rises of her cheeks. Every single one that plunged into her hands was added to her pond of many tears.

Bare feet and bare soul, I think I'll keep walking 'til I don't feel so alone. How is it that the mind can wander even when there's nowhere to go? Asphalt might seem rough to some, but to me, it is the grating pain that reminds me I'm alive. A pebble to the heel is as exquisite as a sharp knife. I stop for a moment and remind myself to take it all in. The ethereal valley before me is surely a charming viridescent hue, how is it I see only in grays? They say that when one of our senses is weakened another is heightened. This must be true because I am so acutely aware of the silence that I'm sure I could hear the wind, were it ever to decide to blow again. How I ache for a morning Zephyr to kiss my hollow cheek. I wonder how many, if any, feet have touched the same spot on which I stand. How many have been lost on their journey and found themselves in this wanderer's land? ~ Francesca

Hey, you who are sitting there on the hill with that little photographic jar box in your hands, when you look at me what do you see? So few people take the time anymore. All you can see is your own reflection in the water but I see the shipwrecks and the monsters of the deep. Do you see how I am shackled to this shoreline fated to dream of the ocean but never swim in it? My antennae feel its pulse, I gauge its flow and current. I'm steadfast in my consistency unaffected by storm or condition and did you know that my design was created when Jesus was a boy? Strong enough to resist every kind of blast, to every kind of loneliness. There are times when the ocean is not the ocean - not blue, not even water, but some violent explosion of energy and danger, biting pieces off the cliff. And the sound is a roaring of a beast whose anger knows no limits. My arms may be old, my skill obsolete but don't write me off just yet. Old is anyone who stops learning and tired doesn't mean lazy. My every goodbye isn't yet gone, so take my picture, because I heard somewhere that photographs give an appearance of participation. Let me tell you, aging doesn't need any fairy tales. ~ Kalahari

The frail body of a young boy. Centered in the Universe. Caught, swirled. The attempt to fish life. To bring ashore. To determine it. The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if they had never been. There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought - to call it by a prouder name than it deserved - had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until - you know the little tug - the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out. Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that every good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and so that it may be one day worth cooking and eating.