1.31

In Xanadu, Khubla Khan laughed at me.
His fountains drowned me.
I died.

1.21

W
W.
UU
VV
W is the sound my soul makes when you
Art is the W of the psyche
Shame, really, how W she has always
Inflammable and flammable mean the same
The same W as W is how I knew
This has been an experiment in semantic satiation.
W is the same shape as her knees when she's working in the flower garden or trying to find the cat under the sofa or crawling into bed. W is the same W as her W when she's working in the flower W or trying to find the W under the W or crawling into W. W w W w W w W w W.
Semantic satiation is the condition of having W. Art is the W of the psyche.
I write all my W in one draft and I worry about my W. And then, I look at the W and I know I'm somehow gifted or the rest of the world is gone W up in a W.

W

W
Fracture

1.18

Kent landed, hard. She fell on top of him, and slid off gently to rest, pinned, between him and the door jamb. Her father looked down from his kitchen stool and shook the desiccated paper once, twice with a dry rattle. His cough was derisive.

1.17

He's running, practically pulling her up the stairs. She's trying to keep pace.
"Kent--" she yells, and he stops abruptly. She piles into him and they both lose their balance and fall through the open door.

1.16

Fear is a tremble: the soul's eyes find a something it can't, and the courage feigns ignorance and flies.
Hate is a tremble: the sum is taut and restrained, waging war against and on a self which self can't understand.
Love is a tremble.
Death is a tremble.
Words are a tremble, and sometimes, when forced, they can stand still.

1.15b

Milton said of women that the beautiful are "stars which breathe forth seductive flames." Byron says that his woman "walks in beauty like the night." Shakespeare says his woman is "far more temperate" than his oft-cited summer's day.
I say nix. No more of this. I'm looking for a woman who isn't celestial or seasonal. I want one as constant as the force holding the smallest particles of myself together. I'm looking for the atomic forces that push my parts together. I'm looking for an unceasing bond of man to wife.

1.15

I've survived, but at a cost I can't fathom. Everything I eat turns on me and claws at my inmost points. Everything I drink stings my heart. I'm alive, but I'm a monster.

1.12b

Heavy and horrible: he hefts and heaves until I halfway shamble from a placticine tube. He's hankering for hope, but he won't have any from my hard corpse. He's hysterical, having hoaxed the last few moments of a hallucinated life from a harpy he, hapless, has.

1.12

Seeming strange: the open lid of her head spilled secrets to me in a proliference of morbid curiosity reversed. I learned about her death and the maligned light of her afterlife, all the while conscious of squish and squelch. Sad, I stitched scalp and sewed smile until she, alone with her thoughts, built myriad castles in a dark, cold room.

1.8

A prospectus for a short story I want to write: heartbeats.
What if you had a quota, and you could run out on a daily basis? What if heartbeats were a commodity? What if there were rich people who died during sex because they forgot to calibrate their electric heartbeat regulators to compensate for rigorous physical activity? What if manual labor wasn't "backbreaking?"

1.7

I can't put the fire out; you try.
No, not that way!
Now the cat's alight. Can't you do anything right?

1.5

I can smell the scent of the previous man on you. It's as if you made love to him and just put your clothes back on for years, waiting for me. How long has it been, darling? Three years? Four? I don't know; it's your secret. You won't tell me because he has such power over you that you go to the trouble of denying it. I can see his ghostly visage now, spectral, frightful, blackening the last white corners of our desiccated future until today I could identify his musk on your breath as I pulled away from the last kiss you'll ever get from me.

And good riddance.

1.4

It's far too warm next to you, but I can't stand the air that whisps its way between our two souls, bare, like electric terminals of naked copper. I can hear your bones move in your flesh, you're so close--almost fully a part of me now. If God was truly love, he would have invented a way for two humans to be closer than this.
(Of course, he has. But that door is closed to us: the sweltering pair in the coldest embrace.)