I don't dare succumb to the allure of optimism. I would rather trust the wheel to fate as my spine tremors with want than pay tribute to consequence, but futures hurtle ignorant of my want or even my being. So I do "the right thing," except for a moment every night when I do what I must for sleep to come.

There is a dignity to the chopping block; a weight to the carriage of one whose life will end with the terrifying swiftness of birth. How I wish for once those broken hearts would watch me with such tearful intensity that a lifetime could be redeemed in a moment. How different is the sickening crack of decision as if life had broken a bone, and you are still laughing but now it hurts and then everything is tears. How different is the stuttering pause of the engine as you conti...

I never sent you the first letter I wrote I was young it was foolish I was foolish And the things it said weren't even true although they became true later. But I didn't have dreams I had holes and you weren't fulfilling you were filling me so yes I left but I was also broken again, but this time tragicly aware. So it was not that you weren't enough because you were the shape of my void but I didn't want a void anymore I'm sorry my healing has done you wrong. I know I am pre...

Is heaven is just the child of my human desparation a tiny gasping infant, blue veined with shaking fists eternally smothered by my guilt? I have to believe for the sore-eyed nights to pass; I have to believe to endure the bright tears and sad-eyed beauty as you turn away. I would trade in the hope of heaven for the certainty of peace; I would give up my soul, hand-written posters on lamp posts saying: "free to the right family." You can imagine how it felt to see the...

I think I'm finally sick of the heart being broken or maybe I've just realized that the "heart" is just a token (if it really was a heart, honey, there's no second breaking; if it happens twice that means that the first time you were faking) and I know it hurts (hell yeah it does) I know it blows (the hell you do) but hell, with broken organs that is, well, the way it goes so bite the bullet--bite it hard and close your eyes, we'll yank it quick (bit the bullet, bite it ...

I stood on the Northern tip of my continent; and you on the Souther tip of yours, as if they were rafts, floating apart just faster than we could swim. My subconscious mantra (begging all my life: please, please, please) lifted leaded feet and I dove, sinking like rotten wood. But the mind is simply the empty center of a matryoshka. So now my heart of gold is somewhere (please, please, please) and my empty mind is nowhere and just for a moment the futility of ...

You know (don't you, my friend?) that life is not the house down the street (with blueberry blue siding and a white wraparound porch) nor is it the threadbare condo with its whitewashed walls and linoleum floors. It is your attic, or your basement, bare wires poised to punish your careless groping. And it is your closet (but only in the dark) with the nails never pounded tbo lunt-head safety and the wire hangars twisted (because that's art these days). But scorn ...

Oh, you floundering fool, full of "shit happens" and full of shit in general-- your early-bird steps never wake me so adjacent nothing may always take me by surprise, just like the scurvy flight of fancy we turned out to be, alternately licking and scratching our wounds, dusty feathers gray with color scattered like wind-borne plumes in fleeting symphony spent quickly to ash. But we are all feathers, you and me and craven friends, all tossed into the ether to in beauty...

You are an infinite imprecision-- a caulk-consolation for my scabbed handful of needs. And the swelling bottle-reality is not "and" but "or" I suppose. (I accept booleans as they come.) You are a paper monument in my mind, but I never blanch, knowing somewhere the true granite rises impregnable. Or a shiny medal, hard and gold, cold against the glass-- a symbol of past joy, or a suggestion of future joy. You are the flagpole upon which I hang my spine-- wh...

A half dozen pairs of pinned-up dimples plotted graceful retreat, squandered every hoarded ounce of resolve. From ear to ear I drifted until I finally left griping behind, accustomed to the sudden slackness of muscle no longer braced with interest. Instead I obsessed silently as a plant might fixate on water. As a cadaver might long for the grave. The grave; as if crushes can kill-- as if this preamble to love was the whole bloody constitution. But my eyes lock with hers,...

She sits upon her beauty as if it were a favorite armchair; no longer a brilliant novelty from a biological furniture outlet but rather a fast friend, old as the peremptory mistress with which it came. And what man could help but swallow reality in shots and revel in the impossible which sprung a dizzy surprise (like Athena, from the head of Zeus) into a damnably sober life? She slept atop her beauty as if upon an antique loveseat, arm covers hanging askew and the polish w...