If I pass you when I am out running you will hear "clack, clack, clack" with every step. That is the sound of the celphone, housekey, inhaler banging against each other in the pocket in the back of my jersey. I don't hear this. I hear the Yeah Yeah Yeah's screaming "as a boyfriend you suck, as a boyfriend you suck, as a boyfriend you suck" or the Pixies slicing up eyeballs in the song that made me fall in love with them because who wouldn't fall in love with a bunch of post-punks who know their seminal works of Dada or Nine Inch Nails and the buzz-saw mechanism of anger and self loathing.

The clack-clacks are all for safe returns, the cellphone for emergencies, the inhaler for dire emergencies, the key to get back into the house. The music is to amp everything up, an urgent beat to drive my footsteps. The confluence of the two, safety and power, allow me to loosen my brain and make an image and word sluice that I keep trying to capture, that I am falling in love with, that I want to share.

It's time to go for a run now, and if I were meeting a lover I could hardly be more thrilled, even though a daylight run does take some of the magic from it. I am not a fleet invisible ghost, I am a real slogging woman, and there are tangles of garbage, listing weeds, cracked sidewalks all fractured in the wind tears in my eyes.