11.30

Since when have you thrown away bottles?
Oh, you know. A while now.
You never used to!
Chane is how we know we're alive.
That's bull.
Maybe, but maybe not. Perhaps there's so much truth--
It's bull. What happened?
I haven't reason to recycle, now.
Not since she left?
Not since she left. Everything is new, now. Give me some time and I'll replace everything in the house.
Ok. I'll miss her.
I plan on taking all our plastic bags and burning them on her lawn. That would get her attention.
It certainly would. Please don't. The environment can't handle too many more of your breakups.

11.27

The thing
crawled
gently across the carpet
and up my leg.
I tried to shake it off, but it clung to me like a chemical reaction set off by some unstoppable catalyst, fizzing and popping and melting all my essential minerals into so much slag.
The thing
scary though it may be
can't
harm
me.
I lied. There's the harm. I feel it deep in my rapidly decaying soul. It caught the barest edge of a crevice and buried itself in the undying ether of my conscious mind. Done with my body, it eats my self, mindless of the rarity of the immortal ghost.
The thing
ached
its way into
my actions today.
You see, I haven't found a way to fight the thing. It always comes to me on rainy days when the weather is wrong and the world is acrimonious. I feel it first as a damp fear in my chest, and then it climbs into my awareness with claws of carrion and clarity. It crushes my will and acts in my place, and all my so-self-named and poorly defined friends look at me with wondering eyes and ask if I really feel okay.
The thing
isn't unique to me
but I forget that
when it loves me with its pain.

11.25

I can see why the Greeks likened her hair to snakes. It's certainly wild enough, but you can tell they didn't look closely. I can understand why they might give her fangs. She's certainly mean enough, but her incisors don't strike fear. I can comprehend why they might say a man's heart would stop beating, but stone? No. Just love.

11.20

She hiked her skirt so I could see the pale blue of her public secret. I tried to look away, but she moved in front of me, laughing like a freight train. You know, I envy her freedom. I would never hike my skirt for a stranger. I take a second look at her. It's clear that she's fresh from whatever farm grew her; she still has that rosy glow around the eyes from doing something verboten and new. I tried in my heart to reason with her, to stop her from the terrible path she chose, to convince her of some higher universal good, but I ended up sleeping with her instead.

11.17

I don't curse.
I don't speed.
I don't lie.
I don't take music.
I don't park in handicapped spaces.
I don't "forget" to tip.
I don't hate anybody.
I don't do wrong.
In every way, I do the right. I try my best. I struggle and fight. I scrape and muster. But if loving you is wrong, I don't want to be right.

Let's stay up all night and laugh at the flow of the moon. Let's go swimming in our neighbor's pool when he's gone to work. Let's drive to the edge of the map and stop where we want to. Let's get tattoos of each other's middle names. Let's stare death in the face, talk so long we forget to eat, live so much there's no room for fear. Let's be superlative. Let's expand the known edges of experience. Let's be more than everybody who ever came before. Let's be brave, and forget why we're here. Let's love, and love, and love.

11.15

He was gay, and he knew it. He had known it for years, but knowing something and telling his disapproving parents about something are totally different things. Some days, he tried to bring it up, sideways, so they would have to talk to him about it.
"Hey, mom. Do you know John at school?"
"The dark kid with the glasses? He's . . . fashionable."
"Yeah, that one. He invited me to a party for his birthday, and I wanted to go . . ."
His mother seemed to always know when he was trying to out think her. He could always first smell the faint acrid scent of her anger before he noticed anything else. Then she would speak. "Who all is at this party?"
"Just some guys."
"Just guys? Why?"
Aggressive.
He eventually stopped trying to sidle up to the problem and ran for it full-bore.
"Dad, how did you know you liked mom?"
"Oh, I'm sure you'll find a girl, son. You're a good kid."
"Dad . . . "
"Alright. Well, I had dated a few girls in my time, and I took a shine to quite a few of them. Got into some scrapes over one in particular. Valerie. What a woman. The problem was, once I 'got' her, I didn't know what to 'do' with her, so I ended up 'doing' her, and we had quite a scare when she missed, well, you know. Anyway, turned out that she had no ability to think about it, just did what her parents told her to, and I decided then and there that I wanted a woman who knew what she was. And when I met your mom, well. That was it."
"No, but how did you know? What changed?"
"Everything changed, champ. Why, you got a girl you've got an eye on?"
Of course not.
"Yes."
"Well, don't worry. When you find the right one, she'll come to you."
Worthless.

When he finally got around to telling them, they acted all shocked like it was something they didn't expect. Ticked him off. So he brought a man home just to spite them. Fitz didn't like being used like that, and he left.
Terrible.

He didn't understand how his parents must have felt that night until his adopted son Phillip brought home a Republican friend from school.
Past.

11.12

I've got toothpaste in my mouth, but she kisses me anyway. She said I always kiss like it's the last time I'll ever see her, and since she said that I always try to live up to the hype. My parents walk in because they heard the noise and all dad can think to say is "Why don't you spit so we can talk about what just happened?" Well anyway, what does dad know about being me? Not like he was ever young.

11.9

Somewhere in the long line of parked cars at the drive-in, my love is with another man in the dark of a car with the subtly moving production of the movie screen light on their sun-drenched skin. I cockroach my way through shade and shadow to the still-warm tailpipe of his Oldsmobile and observe the lachrymal condensation weakly clinging to its cylinder, shivering with the movement in the car. I just know they're inside. I just know it.

I lift a peccant and dolorous eye to see the monster with two backs inside the lightly fogged two-ton can of treachery. Schadenfreude demands I stay. Prudence demands I leave.

I compromise.

11.8

His big, glassy eyes looked up at her through the dimness. She rubbed his ear and he barked, loud. The sound of it filled the woods.
She hauled her shotgun back up to her shoulder and kept walking, hoping that the dog would stay silent and stop scaring away all the game. Her stomach rumbled and churned. She knew that today was the breaking point that decided whether she went insane or starved to death. If she couldn't feed herself and the dog on what she shot today, one of them would have to go. It wouldn't be her; but if he went, her mind would.

11.6b

He made friends with a young undertooker;
His last girlfriend had forsook her.
But he started to curse
When she turned up in a hearse.
He said "From here on I'll only date hookers!"

[Edited from a thing I found]

11.6

Somewhere in the past, a man took a shine to a woman. She fancied him. Fireworks.
Nine months later, humanity got its first friend and greatest enemy: me.

I'm only human. Watch me tear through this cardboard box like it's only paper. Watch me stop this car by force of brakes alone. Watch me build a city out of Lego and step on it in the night. I am dangerous. I am to be feared. I am death.
I'm only human.

11.5

Trees are not that great.
Even I can make a tree.
Poof! A red maple.

11.4

I cried out; no one listened. Maybe I would get better luck if I were more like you, reciting piteous streams of self-indulgent tear-streaked poems at a concert hall crammed to the curtains with chumps. Instead, I rake my breast and tear my shirt in the deep woods where only God and no one can hear.

11.3

His face was illuminated in an awkward rectangle by the rear-view mirror. In the low light, all his features, manly, aquiline, imperial or otherwise, were lost to sight. All she could see was the glassy cornea of his eye, which darted back and forth madly. He didn't know she was awake. The last thing they had said to each other was a comment on how many billboards there were, to which she inevitably replied with her tired story about potential legislative restrictions drowned in physical reminders of the inadequacies of the federal system. He let the story fade from the car and sink into the highway behind them.
He thought she was asleep, she supposed. By all accounts, she should have been, but she was enthralled by the mystery revealed to her by her failing sight. As the night faded around the tiny Acura (chipped and fading), she could see more and more of a man she had never met, but with whom she had always been in love. He was driving her in her car to her home through her territory, and he knew exactly what to do. Every movement he made was precise and quiet.
She couldn't see the scruffy beard or the oversize ears or the gangly arms or the overbite or the receding hairline. He was perfection in her mind, hearing even her fears about becoming her mother or losing the respect of her future and entirely speculative child. He had power and kindness. He had warmth and shelter. Her awareness of him grew to include the car that kept her safe and the future she was living with him and everything she wanted from him until, at two thirty in the morning, he carried her to the door and kissed her awake and whispered something just for her which we aren't allowed to hear.

11.2

He saw exiguous women like her with terrific teeth lounging their way through stores, always seeming to be standing in a doorway or elevator. Their clothes clung to them for fear of being left behind, somehow, out of the glow of her existence. Once, he saw seemed he saw her at a restaurant and thought to stay; he took a corner booth and bought an Irish coffee. The waiter looked at him hard. It was three in the afternoon and the glancing sun motes of sobriety illuminated his two-day stubble. She, in her loose mink, sat at a table in the seeming center of the room. Her bright red lipstick spoke volumes to the color of her soul, he thought. She drank nothing. She ate nothing. Her reason for being in the restaurant seemed only only to be drawing his attention. She didn't do anything for a half of a meagre afternoon hour, his impatience slowly deepening into wrath. This one wasn't his Caroline.
Two weeks later, he still hadn't shaved the hair that crept out of his skin like it was ashamed of being there. He coaxed himself into a coat and went to the library. There, in the regimented stacks about napoleanic and civil and world wars, he seemed to see her struggling with a book that was clearly too large for her. Her arms pulsed as she tried to pull the tome from between fourteen others compiled from scholars prone to overexaggerating just how much information was available about Little Big Horn. He slipped down an adjacent aisle and watched from between two books about Amazons. She took the book down and used her whole self to lug it over to a table, where she used it to prop up her Vogue so she could read without needing her hands for the task, leaving them free to manicure her perfect nails. He stood until a bookish man in brown twill passed him with three small children in tow. The smallest, a small brown blob of boy, looked askance at his voyeurism and he felt so much shame he took The Myth of the Amazon. He felt--so strongly--the opprobrious glare that even after the child was long gone, he checked the book out and read it within the week. That was the affect of her on his consciousness, that, looking at a woman who was not her and judged by a child, he read an entirely dry book about women who had this same affect on men.
It was three months after the last time he saw her that he finally cleaned his mane into a pleasant shape confined mainly to his face, set his jaw into a look of grim determination by means of a vise, and set out to meet destiny. He knew where he could find her. He had always known, of course, since the first time, but he wanted to be on his turf, among street vendors and blocky tenements overhung with windows like a face from myth. He wanted to be out where he felt the most of his power, the closest to Odysseus or Heracles, his minute heroism manifesting itself in Irish coffee and The Myth of the Amazon. He wanted to be in his place of power, but he slunk into hers. The tapestry of sound met him in the street outside. Had he missed showtime? Only by minutes. He could sneak in. Time. He was wrapped in it and sound and a woolen overcoat that was too worn at the edges. He pasted himself to the edges of the room and
in
through the door.
There she was, center stage, larger than life and smaller than he remembered. The door swung shut with a terrific hush, accented in his ears by the subito piano and the crecendo of his heart and the oppressive choking sound of a woman who sees the man she did not expect suddenly entering her performance hall. There she was: Caroline. Take her or leave her, there she was. He left her and the perilous strength she represented and walked to the nearest bar and ordered a stiff pint of Irish brown to drown his new mustache in.

11.1

There is a certain power in lying down and never intending to stand up again. Intending one's own death merely by willing one's self from reality betrays a mental stability and vigor not possible in the mentally ill. Thereby, succeeding, one proves that one need not succeed.