A clef is a key. The genetic code to the lines de-scribing your characters. The pattern fidgets somewhere in between, above and below dancing notation. But there are two clefs, two planes through which a prism scatters patterns and here we must exist in both, at the same time. One does not make sense without the other. One blurs into the other with its curves, one’s two winking eyes fit in the curls of the other.

Put yourself out of time, he flew me in text. What more is out of time than the excess, the outpouring of nine beats hovering over eight. It’s sheer vulgarity. Makes you lose yourself because it clashes with your own pulse. The self/clef has no place to go but out. In the overflow is the soul. It detaches in the context of the music in your head, which is prismatic, inhuman, erratic, and ultimately, your way out.

On the way there I knew I was dying. Strapped into the passenger’s seat. Keys droning on the CD. Wistfully looking out the window at the passing trees and I couldn’t stop it. There was nothing to fear. Nothing to doubt. The mass in my chest was expanding by the second. Colors sprung green (it was the height of summer) and painted themselves Monet-like. The blur was beautiful. The torment beautiful. I looked at nothing but the sky the whole time until the swell. By the stir of the synths my heart was so full with the flow, and everything ephemeral was so lingeringly beautiful I wanted it all to last, and I cried with the acquiescence of a saint taking on the fate of God. It touched the dashboard holy. It thrilled me to think of it all lasting past the last image. Wondered what the final sequence would be like. But I resigned. And the resignation was beautiful.

What separates one bar from the other?

Just the passing of a demarcation, thin and earnest. We are so close to the edge here, we H’s and O’s. So happy to sit still and hear the chords smile, in liaison with each other, so close to the space where the drawstrings fail. And what have we then?

One bar separate from the other.

At the bridge now, more subdued and in the aura of melody, we stood watching the fish drown. We mutely debated the artificiality of their home, switching our gaze from the water to the wings floating on a tree limb. The spiders built scores off our arms, and we pressed them deeper to the edge so our palms grew heavy. He made a reach to take it but I held on. If I let go the world would end then and there. I think the sun was lovely. Webs draped off his pant-leg, clung to him like hair, the whole architecture so fragile the wind didn’t blow. Something darted down below, in and around the jutting rocks. Bits of branches stuck out like daggers. It was possible to swim through the refraction. Passers-by couldn’t hear us say it. The bridge was too wide.

What connects us to other people? Begin/end-tie. It survives the severed line of the slash. It transcends the beginning to end in draw, dashed.

I felt the sharps returning back at the car, seats on separate islands, all this stuff between us. We preferred silence. The walk wasn’t over. He reclined his seat to see through the prism.

Somewhere in the utterances we pushed from our throats, measured, the rhythm blew a window open. We survived the eye of the maelstrom only because the spill is equalizing. A six allows for the ebb; in time, it will stand on its head begging. In another measure it will spin and wind. Reciprocity is balance; balance is nonhuman. We let it breathe, open-mouthed in our linear space. He understood things about my mother. I understood about his father. There were trees overhead. It was getting dark and the shoes on our feet clung. The gear shifted. Movement again.

A collection of black matter gathers up to a stone. The faster it hits the more dense the bone in my chest. Small breaks, curly-tipped. Longer ones with freckles on. We move back with our big toe and the space is familiar again. A different context. Just as fleeting but less anxious about it. We are close to the edge and look the other way. At the time, at the turn, at our ties.

I allowed for the turn-around at the bridge, nodded, reluctant but following along. There was nothing other than the moving music. His impatience. My urgency. There was nothing in the artificial river I couldn’t sketch for myself here, in the lines and figures. I heard the sirens like ghosts from a song. I heard them howl into oblivion but liked the strings better. I liked the thud of chords, the way they lingered between hope and desperation. The way they kept crawling higher but teased around that one unwavering key until the coil trailed off, ever stronger, something stranger, nonhuman.

What follows is out of time. Greater than one. Lines shoot from it like rays, right off the end of the page, but on. More than on. Open.

Subtle shifts on the way home. Noticing the flicker of waning light, lengthening shadows. Another song playing; I hear the hum of the one before. The hall in my head is split, ringing with two different refrains. The lyrics blur into the same thing. Thom’s old cat-whine, winking. It dances off the hood all the same. Perhaps something is renewed, vaguely. Something in the abstract.

I plan a way to see him. Softly accept the air-conditioning, wait until the chill settles then turn it down some more. I set myself to the abstract and nothing less.

The notes are dappled by the heavy lines. Perhaps they are meant to be stretched out so you can’t feel it coming. But you’re counting along, anxious to miss your mark. There is all this space before it’s over. Empty air and every tension to fill it with. When the figures quiet, when the last black dot weighs heavy at the end of the line, what have we to do but keep the chords pressed, dig our finger-tips in for the full count, a deep measure. And this is immeasurable, what follows the swell. Whole now on all white, still in the same key.