The world is lit up by seventeen hundred shiny little white teeth displayed like a window-shopper’s dream. It makes Christmas lights in your eyes, are you my present what happened mommy? Someone vomited on the tree again and we’re laughing now, laughing laughing laughing.

I’ve got a memory of you, it’s decorated with Paris-brown and modernline-blue, that sort of dark and dusty and I am a sophisticate in my nightmares.

You’re on the couch in the building and the street I am under is very, very gray.

Would you eat them here or there?

I wheeled you around, nicotine fingers, long pointy cigarette hands, but you are forever youthful, and if you ever run out of wrinkles around your laugh-lines I’ll be sure to lend you all one of mine.

Sat you down on the floor where you made spots of leopard-print skin on the carpet, dinosaurs and cars and a wheelbarrow and a ball, order was always only just a word.

Abstract eyes, I see paintings in your face when you eat, staring across from me looking over with archeological-dig eyes, tools reaching out and touching me, and then you break into giggles and I can’t help it, you are a carousel not an old man digging in a tomb.

Grave robber grave robber, don’t leave me when I die. Come and burrow under with me and we will play with the ants and I promise I will read every Dr. Suess book to you over and over until we can recite every poetry line with a back-hand glance.

In the dark! Here, in the dark?

Ink pupils, we are a tangle of champagne glasses and your bubbles fill my mouth, but I am afraid I am flat, been touching lips without magic, entrails of a smile, where do you end?

Neenan, Yeenan, will your legs be my horsey? Always and forever, I don’t care when you’re twenty-four, I am still the penguin’s flat grip, you are still the dinosaur lurking behind the shadow.

They thought I’d be jealous. When you tore up the old picture and painted over it with your Vaseline fingerpaint mess, they brought gifts to your knees and turned around to me with sad eyes, sorry but you aren’t adorable anymore, LeeAnn.

That’s okay. Adorable enough for two hundred moons with woodchips from the sun, how do I compete?

That Sam-I-Am, that Sam-I-Am!

One, two, three four, seven eight nine, ten no not eleven, we don’t like eleven. Meow meow won’t get near you when I’m here, covet her claws because I promise, I won’t let her touch you within a one mile radius, not when you cower behind my legs she won’t.

Everyone has teeth, gnaw me down with crystalline, do you remember that book? When you’re forty-five will you look at me, fifty-five in turn, and smile because I’m still thirteen inside, I’m still upstairs reading to you on the carpet of the bed, I’m still walking down the beach stairs with you counting numbers, I’m still crashing cars while Nanny McPhee plays just above our heads, I’m still sitting at a desk watching you bang on keys on Microsoft Word, I’m still feeding you ice cream while Graci drowns, I’m still chasing you around the house, I’m still letting you pet Lizzie, a sun-tanned set of claws in my hand and your delicate little fingers, web-weaving spiders without the blackness, never fuzzy from my mind.

Try them, try them, you will see!

You make me such a little kid and I have so very much to learn. You taught me the world was small and told me that your tongue is big, make up seven thousand words to change the world.

Teach me the alphabet – yours.

I do so like green eggs and ham, thank you, thank you, Sam-I-Am.