It's Winter Here

This is pure licorice, people. Sweet and bitter and black through and through. First you'll get a copy for yourself and not take calls for days, re-emerging to eat and maybe bathe. The CD case will sit atop your stereo and you'll look at it out of the corner of your eye, scornful and loving and perhaps a little afraid. You don't play it again for two weeks but you wear it in your inside jacket pocket. You spot another copy on the rack of your local record store and you buy it and mail it to the teenager in your life with the note, "This is for you now so you won't be embarrassed later."