My voice is new. I can feel my throat tell me this.

My dreams are old selves, dancing and tricking me without a care. My thoughts perturb the sky and giggle, little waifs. I love them all, they are my darlings.

I drift toward a glowing, dripping viaduct. A black sprite precedes me, protects me. I love her too: we are a procession, trumpeting and throwing daisies at the moss and stringing algae. My sprite is black. Every living thing is a bell.

Some grand angel is holding the sky in place for me tonight, so I am safe.

I walk on and the scent of my banshee’s velvet neck stays near. She loves honeysuckle, a dark flower my mother wore on her wrists.

I am dark too, and dramatic.

I am obsessed with myself and speak of it all hours in the privacy of my fantasies. The sound of my song is unpolished and naked like a frog, and I have to sing it as loud as I can before everyone will love it.

The black sprite tinkers ahead.

The glowing viaduct is a distant, glowing dusklight now, and twinkles. I sing my voice and bellow. I make coiled shapes with my mouth and try very hard to draw powerful sounds through and out, to warn of my return. The voice is a once timid thing trying to be brave this time.

I’m still thinking of her blondness and shape, and climb and drag against her in my dreams like a seed. Our mouths touch too. I touch my legs and pretend they are her legs, and her hands. I pretend to lick her palms and sniff the gulleys of her fingers.

She smells like the plush air in a bog.

We share one grieving howl. So I go to my dreams to be thrashed, or I lose my sexiest gal. I press her voice into both ears until it is my own. I sing, and shake uncontrollably at the strangeness of it but it makes me caress myself and suck my tongue lovingly.

It’s like I am staring at a large blue beak, an entrance the size of a palace door. The beak is truly natural and surrounded by effervescent black feathers that bristle in the wind and look alive. I’m scared, and gawking like a freak.

Like I have never seen a beak, which I haven’t, with this detail and size.

What if I climbed into its mouth? Mmm. Yes, yes.

What if I climbed into its mouth and sang our voice?

And then, what if it could speak?

or what if it grew teeth?