Baby’s black balloon was just a tune and then advice and then a lifestyle for the lost and wayward. And ultimately, eventually, the ever present shadowy ghost of a eulogy for the bones you sprinkled on the crust of your youth.

Do you remember dirty dogpile pallets on bedroom and living room floors all covered in yesterday, and breakfast sex, Mars Volta on a computer screen that was really just a big blank wall; Party Monster and Animal Collective with tabs under tongue, rolling waves of freckles and sunkissed armhair amongst your poorest but brightest buds, aye?

It was something even warped vinyls of Mermaid Avenue Volume II and Aussie-acoustic Patience renditions on desolate, electric rooftops could never touch.

The giggles so loud they could cut you through a Polaroid taken at midnight by the neighbor,

whispering the words of a dead stranger you never met but may as well have known as intimately as your fingers knew the insides of your jeans; his eyes said it at all from that side of the Eiffel Tower sparkling,

“Carefully, I love you.”

Ashen pallets decades past, in a mirror, alone to no one, you repeat it into your own vacancy, your own pupil, your own thick skull, whispering still but loud enough to make you fucking listen, bitch — (calm down okay?)

.

“Carefully,

I love you.

…

care

full

y.”