You used to take your guitar and your voice everywhere in the burning palm trees and folk-sing me to sleep with your eyes. Sweet baby. My precious baby boy—your inspiring mouth with its raspberry lips, your almond soda eyes, oh so penetrating and dark, like your perfect bangs. Your voice like an angel’s. Your voice like a blue egg, waiting to hatch and fly away from me.

Private and reclusive, only truly living your life alone before your best friend, an open window, you hate to tell me what you’re thinking. You think and then you think some more and then you think a little more and open the window and cry over your piano. You were thinking the last time I checked up on you. Your beautiful eyes took me by surprise. You took a sip from your strawberry spiked soda and serenaded the clouds in an astounding voice, a trembling voice, like I have never heard a mortal sing before.

You are always just thinking, thinking behind these rosewood doors, and if your daddy wasn’t so influential, you would be considered a bum. You are crucifying yourself on a cross of your own thoughts with your insane and underdeveloped frontal lobes. You are building mummies in the summer clouds. You are going to morgue to write songs for dead people. You are kind and cruel, you are rubies and skunkweed. You are growing like wild cabbage. You are too thoughtful, overripe for your age. You can brawl with the best of us at the folk club, but you are mostly a melancholy drunk who contemplates the years floating down the river of the glass to the sea of your throat. Whoever gave you the keys to the morgue should take them back. You are frightening and sickening me. No matter how frightened and hysterical I am, like a branch breaking in the Garden of Eden, you just smile thoughtfully at me. A little sadly. A little vacantly. You will spare me the inevitable goodbye when it comes—you will dig goodbye out of your ocean of songs and sell it to the world beyond the rosewood doors. Now the palm trees are on fire and the girls are fawning at you for your honeyed words and oh, love, love, love…you eagerly snap down branches from the Garden of Eden and eat their luscious fruit. It makes you more thoughtful and wise by the hour, as your face grows more and more childlike, facing the setting sun.