A Drink With The Madonna of Conflagration

The other day I was talking to the Madonna of Conflagration, and I could tell something was on her mind. Normally our conversations are great: she gives me the latest about her various fire obsessed clients, and I laugh until my lungs hurt. I can't begin to guess how many hours we've wasted arguing about whether her clients should be called pyrophilics or pyromaniacs. But yesterday she was subdued. So we sat there in silence, until she said:

"You know, I liked you a lot better when you were into William Blake."

I pointed out that this was years ago.

"Yeah, I know, but it's just like, you could be a lot more fun then, you know? I mean, you were also an incredible pain too, but the kind of pain it was like, interesting to be around. Those poems you were writing, the ones 'in the style of Blake' but with all that militant atheist shit? Those were really trying. Incredibly, seriously trying. And that time you got a life-mask made because Blake did it, and the guy you went to didn't know what he was doing and ended up ripping out your eyebrows? You were pretty damn hard to look at while they were growing back in. I kept offering to pencil some on for you, and you were all like 'I am a mystical poet, not your fucking Barbie Make Me Pretty'. And then you went on for months about how Lambeth was this incredible place and must have all this great energy, and you could be really spiritual there, and you were totally going to move there, and become a printer and learn to draw and all that shit? And then you found out it was in the middle of London or something and not some shitty little village like you thought? And you kept trying to have visions but, like, you couldn't, because you don't believe in visions, so you started imagining what having visions might be like and you were just wrong, like totally totally wrong? And you kept going out with these women named Catherine and they were all terrible bitches, and you asked one of them 'Do you pity me?' and she threw a drink in your face? And uh..."

She trailed off.

"You were just a lot more fun then is all."

I didn't see her for a few weeks. I think we were avoiding each other. But one day I came home to find a very nice edition of Byron sitting on the doorstep, along with a note that said:

These would make you hilarious -MC XO