How It Adds Up

There was the day we swam in a river, a lake, and an ocean. And the day I quit the job my father got me. And the day I stood outside a door, and listened to my girlfriend making love to someone obviously not me, inside, and I felt strange because I didn't care. There was the morning I was born, and the year I was a loser, and the night I was the winner of the prize for which the audience applauded. Then there was someone else I met, whose face and voice I can't forget, and the memory of her is like a jail I'm trapped inside, or maybe she is something I just use to hold my real life at a distance. Happiness, Joe says, is a wild red flower plucked from a river of lava and held aloft on a tightrope strung between two scrawny trees above a canyon in a manic-depressive windstorm. Don't drop it, Don't drop it, Don't drop it—, And when you do, you will keep looking for it everywhere, for years, while right behind you, the footprints you are leaving will look like notes of a crazy song.