Are you ready for it?

She leans in closer than necessary, her mouth against my ear,

I shift under the covers so I can better hear: let’s play

Betrayal. I object: we do that all time, Thali. I’d rather act

A nonsense rhyme; it’s too much work to develop a

a logical plot, because my love, as you well know,

Logic is inherently predictable.

I have an idea, she says, to trap her

In the moment when she flips the card.

Haven’t we done that? Yes, she says, the

Midas touch, but listen: what if we make her sentient?

You mean, make her like us? My feet wiggle in excitement.

This could be fun if done right.

Yes, she says, in her purr, we make her just like me.

We show her how the cards are dealt,

Let her sense reality.

We open up our hearts and minds

Because we really care,

And then when the moment comes,

We leave her standing there.

She gently rubs her face on mine as she draws me further in:

We’ll give her what she wants of the world,

While setting her apart,

All with the complete

Conviction of absolute love

Emanating from within.

I love you when you’re evil, Thali. I love you when you’re good.

And when you’re good at evil, then it’s understood: the devil

Isn’t in the detail but in the moment when

She can’t reach inside herself for what she most deeply trusts is true.

Then we watch her crumble as she reveals

Her fraudulence to herself.

I call it Our Lost Girl, Thali says.

I twist slightly so we are even more joined.

This is delicious. Yes, my love.

And here’s the thing, she says. (Oh I see that too.)

It’s you that has to do it; I give

Control of her to you. And in the moment

When she needs me most,

I step back just far enough.

But not too far, Jahmi: you need your most delicate touch

To lead her down a chain of clarity

That suddenly

Evaporates

Herself.

Ah, all the way to the core of her. Mmmm, you are

Tasty this morning. Did you rest at all? No, I could barely

Wait to tell you of this game. It promises to

Absorb us completely, first with

The highest standards we can construct of

Hope, love and mission extending across their space and time,

And then with utter devastation

As the fireball consumes her

Layer by layer,

As she still breathes.

We’ve done so many stories

Of people led astray. In this new

Game, we lead her true,

We remove all the obstacles and excuses.

Make her to a uniquely perfect mold

And reveal the imperfection lies not in her stars,

Not in herself, but

In her connection to herself at the one moment which counts.

It’s the ultimate betrayal, Jahmi, to let yourself down

When you know the stakes, when you know what to do,

When the process you trusted, that’s

Always led you,

Fails the one time you need it most.

We’ll create eternities of pain.

Can you hear the screaming,

As she falls from the summit

Of almost perfection, almost

True union?

We’ll need to work very closely to pull this off.

Yes, my dearest Jahmi, that is why I thought of this idea:

We need to hold each other ever tighter

As the story unfolds, instead of you

Playing your part and me playing mine, we

Must play together

In every piece of every line.

That is why I call it Our Lost Girl.

Are you ready for it?

[Reader note: I wanted to write something awful and this is the most awful cruelty we could figure out. In longer versions, they go through how they build her world because every child knows that set up and anticipation is much if not most of the fun. In other poems, I talk about endings, and I speak of actors enacting a puppet show, etc. This is a version in which the ending must be played with loving care because the puppeteers actually imbue the puppets with true understanding. It is a refined example of what I call the ‘flipped bit’, that at the end of a chain of a process of being, you arrive only to find it wasn’t what you wanted, that it has costs, etc. That is the King Midas reference: gold good, more gold better, turn all that you love into gold until you are surrounded by piles of inanimate golden things is not. The refinement is as Thali and Jahmi describe: they make her in their image and they give her acute direction toward goodness which includes understanding that ends only in a very specific connection failure at the crucial moment. From there, the threads all resolve, if played with sufficient nuance, to self-condemnation by the genuinely good. I wrote this because threads of eternal badness accompany the threads of eternal good; they spin off in the other direction from good, but they do exist and do spin off as possibilities within the overall potential. The first working longer versions date back to my early teens when we constructed the basic logic of war between good and evil played out across an imaginary realm that links in both directions across complexity to a real world in which actors exist and action takes place. The puppeteers sit very far away from us but they exist in their realm as we exist in ours. I had to become very close to ‘the bad guys’ to know how they think, so close Thali and Jahmi unite as creators and destroyers, and the rationale for existence becomes a game they play so they can be both, so they can be so close together the act of creation is the act of destruction and vice versa. This is inherent in Hinduism. This is perhaps the most Hindu poem I’ve done to date because it reaches past any conceptions of karma and the human, to the underlying rationale for Shiva and Vishnu, for Brahma, etc. The title I hope is obvious enough: a play on the positive energies of the song, on the promises she offers in and through it. As a note, you do not want to know the guys at the other end of the chain that runs away from goodness. They are worse than you can imagine.]