=book recently read: Just Kids by Patti Smith

Well, she loves him, you see, she loves him so much

She loves him so much she tells her own story by telling us his

She loves him so much to the end of her life and beyond it

She loves him so much

She loves him so much she doesn't see he doesn't love her

Not the way she loves him

She doesn't see what he sees when he looks at her body

What he feels when he touches her body

She doesn't feel

It's something quite different

Because they are four different people in love with each other

But there's one person missing

He doesn't even realize it himself it's so beyond what he wants to accept

They are two souls alike with four different bodies wanting one thing

They want to be artists

They go hungry. They go cold. They sleep in uncomfortable places.

They wear makeshift clothes.

One day an older couple sees them walking through Washington Square Park and the wife says to the husband "Take their picture, they're artists," and her husband shrugged her off, "Artists," he scoffs, "They're just kids."

They are like ghosts, in other words, only a few sensitives can see.

They want to be seen by everyone which means being seen on television & in museums but one of them needs to be seen more than the other

It makes sense that it's the one who takes photographs

He's looking for himself, like she is, but he's also looking for that missing person

He is the one who wants to be a star the most, to ascend that spiral zenith

She'd be happy to chart his rise 

She's the one who follows after him following the trail of stardust that he sheds

She's the one who sweeps up behind him, takes the crappy jobs to buy the soup he must slurp to stay alive while he dreams of being crucified Adonis on a movie marquee

She's the one who gets lucky when he gets lucky and finds the rich hero just like in the movies

She's the one who would have been happy right here on earth poor as two mice in a floorboard
But to go higher he must go lower than the floorboards
To find the ladder to heaven he must go to the curb
To climb out of the gutter first he must go into the gutter
He stands on street corners dressed in scarves & leathers waiting for men to pull up the sidewalk and motion him into their cars

When she starts singing it's almost by accident

She starts out drawing pictures, writing in spiral notebooks

She writes to Rimbaud and Blake and Whitman and Jim Morrison and Jesus and Joan of Arc

She scribbles them secret love letters in notebooks while sitting in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel watching an entire cultural history march by 

She starts reading these letters at clubs on a dare out of desperation out of an unbearable need to split her skin

She's seeking a way out 

But a way out of what

Herself?

Where would she be if she found a way out of herself?

This is the one question that seems worth the answering. 

She adds a guitarist and that's the beginning of something she didn't expect

They think she's a junkie, a lesbian, a punk

They see what they want to see and that is her luck

They haven't any idea how uncool she really is, how romantic, how innocent, how shockingly normal

Allen Ginsberg bought her a sandwich she couldn't afford in an automat once thinking she was a boy he might feed & then fuck

She picks up a camera, too, when the time comes, and it comes too soon

She goes on taking the pictures he didn't take

She sees a different world than he sees 

They are like a beast with eight eyes that cannot see itself

They are living in two worlds even before he leaves the one they share

She is married in love with someone else and has children not theirs

But she feels him leaving when he rides out of this galaxy on his last breath, dies of AIDS, aged 43

He leaves so much of the world unseen and undreamed into being 

He leaves the world and she lights a candle she will not let it flicker out

Not to this day does it flicker out

She is careful, so careful not even to breathe on it

She goes on photographing all the places he isn't 

Through the camera lens she finds that there aren't any places he isn't 

She never leaves home without him

She sings & she dances & she paints & performs & takes photographs

She never leaves home without him