Building an Opera for the Woman You Love so that She May Ruin Your Life

If we'd had no books or poetry
No music to sustain us
If there were no movies to guide the way
We would have had to invent them ourselves
To learn exactly how to love

But everything ends happy in the movies
Every book resolves with someone's catharsis
Every sober verse speaks of a lovestruck nature
Entirely foreign to real life
Every song tells of unhappily never was
So you can't get a sense of perspective
You can't come to believe that love is real
And there is life in every word we say to each other

Good or bad, we should come to expect the paisley rebellions
The insect revolutions that lead us further down the road
From picnics and fireworks
To a winter that doesn't end
And we go on calculating a pound of flesh
For a broken promise
But you lose weight so fast when you don't eat
And that promise stays broken

I once thought it was only natural that everyone falls in love
That everyone should expect to one day find a mate
Have the children in a quick fashion
And then retire from an exciting life
As all millionaires can do when the time is right
I once thought everyone would be millionaires
Or at least I would be a millionaire
And fall in love
It's only natural, I told myself
Did you not tell yourself the same thing
Before you lost your way
And fell in love by accident?

Making a detour through a tomato patch
Where red fruit blossoms under this baby bird sky
I found myself hating the bruises inside my heart
Because I had bargained them over years
And convinced myself they would never exist
So I turned once more to those sad songs
And the painful poetry
To the corduroy novels
And the sanguine movies

I decided to start something new
I decided I would act as if there had been no movies to guide me
Through that first laminated experience
And that there was no marker to gauge progress against in this
My own sad twilight of empty dreams
I would make something from nothing
Even more than nothing, not a zero number but a negative
And then I invented a great story in my own head
And wrote it down in coded longhand
Behind every single word was a message
About a boy that gets the girl
I didn't show it to her
I kept it for myself
To dream of a happily ever after
That only came for someone else