International Harvester

Sometimes the tears fall like jazz-infused droplets, you wipe them with your sleeve but there’s no space there because that’s where your heart is. You tried replacing it with a diamond ring but that grew red and sat outside the chest like the picture of the Sacred Heart you saw in a museum in Seville. The museum that only lasted a day.

The tears drip not from your eyes but from the branches of a melody you are creating, formless but structured. It wanders upwards and seeks out its own trajectories but stays close to the trunk, keeps coming back to the B flat. Her hair has twigs in it, little stray grace notes that are bloodless, have lost their edge and are out of time.

When you compose, you imagine a hat and a pinstripe suit. You really imagine a tiger skin suit but you tell no-one about that. The hat you really imagine is not the Fedora you show us but an insect, recently killed. Japan weighs heavily on your mind, the trees are always German and only the ferns can cool your fury when it rises, as it does, to spread on your neck.