The first time you heard Gloria, it felt like a ghost playing with your hair while a crush punched you in the gut. It fizzed like lime squeezed over a fresh ice Coke, smelled like second-hand smoke in a rusted car, and tasted like a split lip bleeding jewels through grapefruit chapstick. But today it feels like shoulders cracking, tastes like penny caramel, and smells like aging plaster, gasoline, and that acrid brand of distant smoke where someone threw some sour, plastic trash in a wooden bonfire. (Knowing those types, it was prob’ly books, and records just like Horses.) The first time you heard Gloria, freedom smelled like weeping cedar cutting through the whine of turpentine and oils clung to canvas of a sailor-style jacket in a grove attacked by parasitic names and little hearts. It felt like copper wire heated nearly Vincent yellow, spooling through the ribs to lasso out your nihilism every time the Music caught you pulsing like a nuthatch in her owl talons, wondering what colors you would shred. It tasted like a cowboy- titled pepper-mushroom omelette served with shakes at 3 AM, across the street from the chthonic, neon bowling alley glow— Americana still could come off kitschy-sweet. (Do you wanna walk down through the dewy grass of night along the highway, stain our sneakers green where coywolves cry, get plastered and play air-hockey, slouch back to your apartment, where the weavers trap the porch lights, and the sidewalk branches graze the bangs of all your twisted vixens, tell your roommate hi & bye, and mess around?) Today, Freedom is an acid, keening shriek, who wears a diadem of vultures. She’s thinner than parchment paper made translucent with baked oil. She smells like marsh and looks like lacy Wyeth curtains, spectral, flapping over someone else’s East-Coast-gothic desperation. You hung curtains made of twin-size sheets the first time you heard Gloria. What plays on the drive-in screen of mind to words like pocket-knives and chords as ponderous as dragging up the back steps of a tenement in Brooklyn with a big bronze bell or the loot of a fresh-robbed grave? Do you see glitter projectile-pouring from stigmata—hands bent tense— perverse, sublime, in platinum disco of a fountain? Do you see the shy & fumbling, vilified kiss of two tattooed- punk-vested-trucker-hatted- puppy-footed queers? Do you get that squirmy feeling just like field mice built a suburb outta dry-as-kindling fluff-nests through your abdomen? (Do you wanna get bit by thorns and wear your heart outside your chest and weep like perfume?) Do you watch your palms pound skinless on a door of oak and lead that feels more like a ship or wall than it ever did a swinging threshold? Does it sting to pull the slivers from your fists as rows and rows of flames make pulsing, ruby hearts of crystal jars? (Do you wanna make out with a saint to watch them catch on fire?) Do you glisten with the fever of entangled, grimy dancers in a strobe-lit, beery basement? Are you heavy with the stomp of work boots? Sticky with the blood of lambs, of resin dust, and nicotine and lapis blue egg tempera?