Old Testament Vernacular

There is a magic in the way a people, a place can translate into a sound.  A music that itself embodies its creators so fully that it takes on a new life, like a child born.  I have watched the face of a woman sing with the same unconditional love for her song that radiates from a mother's eyes when she cradles her newborn; warm and fragile and everything we believe when we first hear the word promise.

Sometimes in smoky dens.  The night is lighter outside than where we sit, huddled around a small table within a crowd that shapes like water to its barriers.  The band had yet to play and it was then you called her a Philistine after you had read the words gouged into the black paint of the wall--

Too much sex, too little Jesus.

I held my own thoughts close, because here was a place to marvel.  To listen.  Nothing about our years was a comfort.  Even the little slips of paper that you would drunkenly pass to me from your fortune cookies seemed to mock us.  How could they believe in Ghosts but not in God?  You'd shake a finger at nothing that would unconsciously follow the beat of the bass...the blood in my capillaries...

'The living haunt us.' 

The last thing I hoped for was a dance lesson on a spring night.  Corporal movements lit by bonfire.  Here I stretch out my hand to take yours and we smile.  What happens next will be the contract, and someday when it is cold you will lean up to whisper in my ear...

'This was your promise to me.'  

Then, we will live in each other's eyes, and move, and move, and burn.