“How do you memorize a piece that is so long?”

SmUGLY, the piano man smeared the humbleness across his lips.

“You see, it’s a conversation.”

As smug as he was, he was quite an artist. He had spider hands that spoke with massive purple lips to the elephant’s guns
and related their experiences.

They spoke rationally and then loudly and then pugnaciously.
And eventually softly, to draw the cowardly creatures back into them.

And the elephants would shake, vibrato and air escaping through their wooden bodies.
Never would they know a sensation like this again.

And the piano man acted as a vessel for these spiders to explore and shock the ants of people in the audience.
Those ants are small-brained and all they could say, “Well that was so pretty.”

But under a hot moon, on abandoned terrain, would the piano man find the greatest sense of euphoria,
among the sand that had been the home of his spiders’ friends.
If ivory could grow, it would be here,
beneath the heat and sweat of the land.