Because the trembling lashes are ready / Cuz the door cracks like a whip

We started off as strangers,
you and I.
And I’ll always wonder -
if there had been others
would I have picked you?
Your brothers were already gone
by the time I got there
so I paid for

Me sitting down before a cheesecake factory menu
and seeing only letters.
Me fucking without even a hair as much the enjoyment
I get from a waffle--

In my earliest memories, I am building tall towers out of indigo blue picture books

Because cigarettes are one thing, 
but my baby won’t have me smelling of shame.

I did not raise my glass in toast to the passing of Gene Hackman.

I don’t fully recall when I realized that the smoke detector was going off

Other times it’s about motels in Nebraska or 
gum ball machines or a close-up of a woman’s 
face.

They always think I’ll wave to them.

The glass always refilling / and fracturing his life

I have been waiting to become a better writer so that I can understand them.

The forecast predicted devastation,
So I scattered sandbags around my house,
Closed the window,
And waited for the deluge.
Fingers gripped my hair and
Yanked me back like a bucking

The first shall be last and the last shall be first, Frank said / that’s from episode 42 / 
of the telly series Kung Fu, /  ‘This Valley Has Terror’

Sex is the opposite of being a novelist, and I would rather live between them.

Being an artist is just another phase, / like a kid who eats the glue sticks

Maybe next era I’ll get to experience love.

Stripper show / Hostess bar / Karaoke club

But there’s no cup, no / kitchen. Just one mouldy / statue, dreaming of television.

Torn textbooks at Widener Library or seeping 
Inkwells those Cajal axons 

out in the Everglades, no resurrection
just a rotting boy's corpse

the day i was born i was yellow and poisoned and anxious.
and they put me under a sunlamp and burned it out of me.

Drug Plane

I was fifteen, then sixteen, then twenty. My high-school friend was my now college roommate. His stepfather was less mysterious but more compelling. He was having trouble with his

We are like dogs in a dog park, smelling each other, breathing together

We're asked to think about examples of unconscious bias and I think about the guy who goes to

Heaven but it's Chinese.

Last spring was the last spring.