4.03 / March 2009

Going crazy is more subtle than you’d think. You won’t notice until going becomes gone. I’m telling you because it’s probably good to pay a little more attention. It’s harder to pretend from this side. I know when I tipped to past tense. I sat on the toilet and broke in half, maybe more.

Lisa’s room was small but artful and Cassie coveted it. Her own room seemed that of a young girl still—the walls papered in images of red and pink giraffes and elephants, were thumb-tacked with posters of her heroes—William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy—yellowed and peeling at the edges from age.

—go inside from eating Concord grapes fresh from rickety arbor, garden of fruit-fleshly delights, can’t resist globey-purple grapeflesh, sucking eyeball-center with juice by popping skin aburst directly into mouth, fruity pop-gun— —grandmother asks, “have you been eating those grapes?”, she knows, waits, wants me to answer tremulous “y-e-e-e-s?”, knowing what’s to come, marched to bathroom

Haunted is an apartment where a woman lived. Someone like your wife, or soon-to-have-been-ex-wife. Do people even say such things? Haunted is an apartment where a woman died.

How does one write a love story that is not tragic? Must all love be tragic as all love must end as the story ends? The plots are basic. The characters love, but they are flawed and the love ends.

Sometimes you look at the world and you can’t understand it for all you try. They tell you the trick is to adapt, to get used to it, to conform. I know that much already.

He liked baseball and porn, favored Girls Gone Wild and the Mets, liked me to watch him pee while he sang Love Hurts by Nazareth. His favorite color was a blue Camaro, rain-rusted and troublesome. I don’t remember his name, just his breath: Jameson’s and a sweet candy tongue.

I marched into the kitchen and dropped my suitcase onto the floor. It exploded. Dirty socks and frayed underwear sprung onto the appliances. “I’m home,” I said. “Where have you been?” asked my mother, blowing steam from a cup of coffee. “Everywhere. I am a world traveler. I have seen everything and met everybody.

To rub one part of I against another to create music. This violin of oneself, this rough strum of I, arc of wing over thick rib. This masturbatory chirping like the meat of God clenched in your teeth, an apostrophe giving aloneness possession over the inarticulate, a bridge between chords.