Your spidery hands crawl over the aged,
chipped ivory teeth of my piano
spinning your webs,
ensnaring me
inside a miniature movie of
your thousand year old mind;
So this is what
your thoughts look like.

Let me show you mine,
what I think of
when you sit and play.

When you play, it is a thunderstorm in the desert
after a ten-month dry season
where the brilliant pinks
of desert roses glow brightly
and the razor-tips of yucca plants
soften with the battering of silver-bullet-drops
and the zombies of dead, poor weeds regenerate,
springing back to life.
When you play, it is black Cuban espresso
sweeping through a bloodstream
diluting the red wine of life
with swirls of liquid brown energy -
a jolt of power to an otherwise weak,
dying system.

I swear, Orpheus, you could wake the dead
and they would race
stumbling barefoot over stones and thorns
with bleeding feet and broken souls
they would race to follow you
back to the world of the living.

...All from this lush velvet cushion
my feet bare on the ottoman
scribbling in spider-scratch-writing
just sitting
watching you play.