To Pat Payne
I hope your humble modesty comes in handy for me someday, my aspirations beyond ‘zines and editing solely for myself. Someday when I’m an architect I can sit in a classroom reading my other life away, wearing the clothes I don’t wear out of context, living the life, two lives and one in pink polyester one in jeans probably shell necklaces and dreadlocks probably reading with a glass of red wine through a tiny lamp in a dark window over La Cienega somewhere after worthless days at the office. Oil and sweat when she painted, wine and cigarettes when she didn’t. Probably in a small dark apartment whose walls have been painted infinitely for each tenant, building up a history of ignoring its occupants, more than the clothes cover up our real lives all day answering phones in a small sunlit office with people is no place for a small dark poet whose voice turns as many times as the lives she’s lived. And the hours of the day she turns over in her head how many times she just wants to run away from it all.