Hawaii Interstate Highway (redux)

"I've already told you: the only way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment. I know none other as sure." ---Marquis de Sade

Stop shaking your head. Gimme a chance to explain...

Long distance relationships open like pop-up books. Her pop-up book is in Manhattan.

I like stealing stuff---if I like you. I case every woman who catches my eye trying to see what they're hiding. You can't give your phone number without giving something of yourself. Every little hair on a woman, even the peach fuzz, is a fuse.

I watch some guys staring at their girls like kids staring at a candy store window. Which gets me wondering, along with the girl in most cases, is he making that sweet expression at *her* or to himself in the reflection? So the girl looks over at me and sees the crowbar in my eyes. I can't hide it. Fortunately it's not WHAT you do but WHO you do it with. I find my markets.

But every time it feels the same when it clicks with somebody. I pick the lock and break into their life and instead of trying to steal everything, I end up wanting to move in.

I'm in full-on burglary-mode when all of a sudden I find myself liking the way you crookedly hang that painting, the way your bookshelves lean, where you dogeared pages or underlined stuff, your pajamas, that you're a pack-rat for every letter an ex sent you and you're amused I burned everything I had with my first kiss, your sticker books and photo albums, that you kept a lock of your hair from when you were six and now your hair's a different color, how you had a street portrait artist embellish your likeness when you were going through an ugly phase and everybody pretended you were that pretty, you were entirely frigid with one boy and put out on the first date with another and you don't know why the difference, that I thought my first girl was the one until we popped each others cherry and I knew she wasn't, that you want a dad and your cute little boy at the same time out of a husband---oh yeah---AND the guy you'd risk all that for to cheat with, you want to have your blueprints for the rest of your life approved of, you want your history to be a rumor that YOU spread, you want me to cast my net at you swinging over and over and never get more than half your butterflies, you want to be my private petting zoo, you want me to pry you down from your ivory tower over the intercom, I want a muse who fucks like a whore, you want to be able to hurt me and build me up, you want me to trudge through your sewers and step out onto your penthouse balconies, you want to take your top down in conversation and have my breeze run through your hair, I want you to kiss the stretch marks and cellulite on my brain, you want me to contemplate every guy who ever wanted to get into your pants, you want jealousy, you want me to be loyal but only because you're amused that I'm a born serial-cheater, you want the church of your heart to have the choir on fire and neither of us willing to piss on them cause our sex life is a cookie jar, you want to get our plans on wheels, you want somebody with no plans, you want Monopoly on weeknights and Risk on weekends, you want somebody who can fight but also listen, a caveman with a daunting reading list, you want every smart person you know to feel castrated next to goofy imaginative things we've come up with, you want Dan Starling as our neighbor, you want me to be fucked-up but lucid, you want our kid as the final jury on us, you want relativity here and there but stuff that comparison can't touch other places, you want love letters and suicide notes and me to pretend with a straight face like I know what the fucking difference is most of the time, you want your melody to feel like a symphony, I want my note to feel like a melody cause we're both wondering how many inches it takes to reach your heart, I want crop circles waking up next to you, your revolving door eyes that never get any my toothpaste back in the tube, you want to be my God and have me as your bible, I want you with telescopes and microscopes and a club and a cave and no viable heat source but me, you want me to accept that you have an abiding, unadulterated crush on Adrian Brody despite the fact that both our mothers are Hungarian, you want to be an Asian girlfriend for a guy whose never had an Asian girl look at him twice, you want to be my fire escape---more architecture than utility---my heart as your personal scrapbook, and Brinny you can still fall in love 10,000 times but it doesn't have to be with 10,000 different girls it can be with me, over and over, like some karma on spin cycle and no tag-backs, and we can be off-key, dirty utensil conversation trying to get at each other, and every soliloquy can be one long stutter, you want nobody keeping score and I want EVERYTHING TO COUNT and why the hell am I inventorying all this shit, oh yeah it's Thanksgiving and that's your dad across the room and is it supposed to be lost on me that he's sorta shy and bold in a fairly demonstratively obvious ode to picking me as your fella and if I get your headlines you can use my fine print as toilet paper cause since I was 19 I could swing a rejection letter with both hands behind my back which I don't mind so much when I'm holding your hand because being with you, long distance or coital, reminds me riding a bike with no hands, excited and cozy, and this whole fucking thing and all those other people stinking in our nostrils don't have to matter so much, nor my book of wet matches, I don't feel like such a pinned insect anymore, my garbage and maladjusted apparatus wasn't flammable until I met you, be my pyromaniac and I'll be your kleptomaniac, we'll get the hang of it, this is a piece of chipped paint off my Davega Bicycle, we can be cigarette butt train wrecks in each others ashtray, you can sign letters in lowercase so I'll imagine you on your knees and try to map out more ways to sweep you off your feet, now you're making me a little nervous for not having wiped this thing's nose, I only told you I could read palms as an excuse to hold your hand, everything else was drinking through a fucking bent straw as soon as I saw you... so do we have a deal?