vapor forgotten only a smudge left behind tears on newspaper

I know: a month later it's not cute anymore, just pathetic. I know: the cute waitress at the pizza shop deserves a second glance. I know: I said I wasn't waiting, but I stay up to spend less time in bed staving off memories like Judas staved off his silver. I also know: when I'm with you I turn off my cell phone, because it was only on in case you called.

Believe me, it's not even worth explaining. My life is static, changing in fact never in function. My life has family-channel problems: no sex or drugs or women or thugs just money and boredom and tears. My life is the commercials of a really great show; my audience is watching on mute, throwing back popcorn and vodka and trading whodunnit opinions and I don't blame them for not caring. My life is a joke, lame and obscure, not even worth explaining.

People are like planets, swallowing circumstance in an immensity of inertia, hurtling through darkness with no guide but habit. With my heart, with my thoughts, with my life, I would move you; but how does one move a planet? How could I correct your course? Our orbits meet only for a moment-- to be together have we any choice but to collide?

Thank goodness the line in the sand has been obscured by footprints, the conflict forgotten thank heaven the wall has crumbled into piles of precious stones scatters like beads of a necklace thank God mistakes have faded like the impression on your side of the bed (my heart burns with the heat of my apology.)

basically I am just your average superhero when the stars align and the aces come and the bob-tailed nag takes first I have had my square-inches of spot-light and I have had my telephone booth moments so when fate sees fit on occasion to tear my wings in mid-flight I hold the scowl drink the whiskey raw because if everybody flew the skies would be too crowded.

Distraction at the rate of twenty-four frames per second of sleeping-limb numbness of pureed passion screen-bleeding into hollow heads or hollow hearts like a tire-plug, just enough to last until that heart or head can be replaced entirely. Of all the things I own, I love my television the best.

It's all I'm good at these days-- the systematic input of calories. A screen and a spoon and I forget what I cannot input: the smell of your hair after a shower, the playful battle for the top lip. You'd be suprised at how much I like eating, and how little I enjoy it.

She was my fountain, my muse; I was full of her lips grazing across mine, brimming with hips consciously restrained. She was not a deep well of joy, but a wild ocean of an angel-- and I was special too, because I knew. I drank deep of happiness, for the keeper of the source never thirsts. I continued long after she left, laid off without solace but to quander my remaining fortune. Then with poetry I scraped everything I had left like jam from a jar, somehow not realizing t...

By this law I have lived: one cannot be happy with another if one is not happy with oneself. But what self-improvement have I pursued that was not to make myself desirable? Do I wear chapstick for health, or on the off chance that I meet someone tonight? I wonder: could I be happy alone on a desert island? Even if I had no one, I could be whole. Whole, like an amputee with phantom feet.

I have ridden my memories like a bicycle one time too many, and now they are paint-faded rust-laden lackluster rubish no longer solid colors except for the brick red of iron oxide.

We last spoke the eleventh of may. (Lovers never know the last kiss is the last.) To us it was just one more day discussing the drifting vectors of our lives, comtemplating impending demise. Loving you made me wish I'd never loved before; made me want to diminish everything that came before you. But "her" was not always you, my love. That pronoun was once elsewhere directed, and left behind the kind of memory that leaves ghosts when killed. It isn't fair to forget; after al...

I miss melancholy, her tender advances tingling like fingers drawn across my cheek. I miss the pang of desire, her hand circumnavigating the perimeter of my thigh; I miss pretending I am out of control, my stash hidden just beneath my brain stem. I miss misery; what a shame that lost loves do not remain, but simply fade away.

We were just kids in prison, groping bars of angry certainty: I am right; we are right. Just kids in prison, alone to face the stares of the innocent. In prison, and just enough sustenance for ninety days in hell. Hell, we both said, and consumed each other lavishly, pleasure marked in paths like cookie crumb trails. Hell for ninety, heaven for one: we drank deeply to drown fear in contentedness. We were just two kids in prison, too young to imagine teeth dropping from des...

To learn to live knowing we err-- the one meaningful apology.