Saturday, January 12, 2013

There She Goes My Beautiful World (for Nick Cave)

I wanna tell you you're my world
I'm not just saying that because you're roughly spherical
I'm not just saying that because you weigh over 5 septillion kilos
I'm not just saying that because you complete a full rotation every 24 hours

I'm saying it because I want to explore you
I want to climb your hills
I want to dive to the bottom of your seas
I want to negotiate treaties between your face and ribcage
I want to test Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles on the backs of your knees

I don't know what that means, but I want to find out

Because you're my world
Even though you walked all over me
Even though you crushed my heart
Even though I don't know what you were thinking that day when you walked into my life, clad head to toe in yellow rubber, barking incessantly in Norwegian

And for the next few months we were lost in the fever of our hearts
Telling each other those little reassuring things that lovers tell each other
Things like, "You're beautiful"
"You complete me"
"You'd be the perfect woman if you weren't so racist"

You knew how to push my buttons then but it seems now you've forgotten
So let me remind you:

WITH YOUR FINGERS

So you left
And it was after you left that I first met Nick Cave
At a Weird Guys In Black Anonymous meeting
And 24 hours later we were sharing a one-bedroom beach shack in Tahiti
And those were happy days
But as the Bible says, man cannot live by angry tropical gothic sex alone

We walked together down a dusty, hell-blighted road
Sharing a Golden Gaytime
And he told me a story, he said:
I met an old man on this very road, coat made of coyote skin, eyes like coals, and said, let me tell you about a woman I once knew, who said, Once, I knew a boy...

And I said wait, are you telling me a story about a man telling you a story about a woman telling him a story
And Nick Cave said yes, it's meta-fiction

And I saw the opportunity I'd been waiting for, and I smiled and said, I've never meta-fiction I didn't like

And with that Nick Cave took a piece of wood and beat me viciously for three hours straight
And I spent the next 5 years learning to walk again

All for you!
Because I remembered how much you used to like watching me walk
You used to say, walking is God's greatest gift to man
And I said, what do you mean?
And you said, man used to have to crawl along the ground with aching fingers and chafed nipples
Until God gave men legs as a reward for passing his tae-kwon-do exam

And I said, that seems to be a point of view not grounded in accepted biblical tradition
But I don't mind
Because when you tell it, and I look into your eyes
You remind me of a Nick Cave song
A good one
Not one of the weird ones
Probably the one with Kylie
Yeah
When I look into your eyes you remind me of a song about killing a girl with a rock

Because you're my world
And not because you're covered in ice at the top and bottom, and hot round the middle
And not because you're inhabited by thousands of species of beetle

But because when I'm drifting through space, passing all the planets
You're the only one who can give me oxygen

And when it comes to committing to a long-term relationship
I consider a girl who won't kill me by asphyxiation to be
The bare minimum

My beautiful, beautiful world

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