I am re-reading Dorian Gray, haunted by silk brocades and yellow silence. In the shadows of fading neon lights above the old Mcdonalds, I grow afraid, as if the intensity of myself were too much to bear, and pens become knives that will carve into my skin like tattoos, or hollow me out into those wooden figures that dot mantelpeices like flies. In a vaacum that is neither poetry nor fiction, truth nor prose, I fold into myself like freshly laundered linen, peonies plucked from grass, the bright red of tulips reflecting a sun that burnishes itself onto your golden hair.