I'm going to abandon everything / after this poem 

Had a dream he was chained to a mountain while a buzzard ate his liver.

By the time Zoe and I started down the Overseas Highway, we had been living a nomadic lifestyle out of our 1995 Corolla for nearly four months. 

“I’m just excited that my first time voting in a presidential election was for a woman,” my daughter said

“yeah,” I said

“that’s so exciting,” I said

What dispossessed me sat erect beside the checked quilt in fishnets.

Violette moved away from Calvin toward a group of rhododendrons.

Calvin felt calm.

He thought about God.

& no I'm still not thirsty / although i find myself / thinking too frequently / about jagerbombs

I didn’t ask why you spent all that time and energy making a hole with all the wrong tools instead of calling the landlord. 

I got my dad’s big nose and people make fun of me for it.

Writers are running out of good guy badges. Virtue signaling shame ponies and other cultural nyet.

[victory lobe] 

tiny towns or a dog could keep me pleased  

for six months, then I’d wear felt triangles  

look... more

It’s time.

Because anytime is the right time for a haiku.

The Hungarian brings flowers to break up with me. I can see him through the window as he takes them from the trunk of his car in the Starbucks parking lot. 

See John's last Adventure Comic, "The Lucky Texan," here!

I usually distance myself from someone after i’m physical with them.

Skateboarders have to be tough. It’s not if you’ll get hurt but when, not if it will be bad but if it will be bad enough to keep you off the board.

I sent a text to my father, telling him I saw three coyotes. My father is an admirer of the natural world. I sent another text about a nearby house that had been abandoned. I'd noticed the word “SATAN” scrawled across the front door with blue paint that morning.

Ted had started the holidays in Aspen. Well, in the jail in Aspen, awaiting trial for a murder he’d committed in Snowmass.

It's the kind of world that makes you vomit well into sobriety.

In the dark we weren’t afraid to show our ugly selves. We admitted we loathed giving up our seats to old people and the pregnant. Don’t you just hate reading?  We both said at the same time. 

My novel is my father, I am saying, and it too is the best art I could make but not the best art I will make. For I am 33 and my feminist Jungian therapist says often: the beginning of adulthood is forgiving your parents for their sundry errors.

Halfway through Pilates class, the teacher decided to use telepathy. She said she was sick of the sound of her voice, always repeating the same cues. 

Understand, neurotic perfectionists are mostly calculated

We left after midnight. We entered the forest, dark and green all around us, hundreds of miles deep.  Woven together in the little cocoon of our car, our world was as large as the headlight beams in the dark forest.