No more songs for all you fools, broken-hearted and twice innocent. The ones yet too unripe to know what awaits you. The living years of loving are mostly futile and will end in disappointment and cold tea. Didn’t they tell you? You too will grow weary of what little the world offers by way of consolation, of eulogy for dead mistakes and one-way streets. There is little empathy, you’re silly to hope.

Give me the meat of longing greased in the fat of love. Give me hunger that knows the infinity of a belly. Give me wanting dripping with what we know of loss – the chasm where sound goes to die inside the throat. The want that does not close. The gaping cavities shaped like once-upon-a-times. Rents in the fabric that stitches do not mend.