Like many other men in their seventies, my father has prepared a set of final directives.

I start with which would you rather as an opportunity to open up the conversation for a set piece I've prepared. In summer I might ask how does everyone like their air.

Say we're sorry!

[Previously on... Part 3 :: Part 2 ::  Part 1] Last time, Lt. Pup got Mental-bombed by a Cat spy and... more

Baby Hitler giggles and pulls another leg off the spider. Just three legs this time. He pulled them... more

Are you Beyoncé? My daughter says.

I am holding a pair of Nike kneepads in my hand.

No, I say.

I am not Beyoncé, I say.

I think about how the flashes bouncing back from selfies seem really ‘cinematic’
and how shia labeouf seems very alaskan
alaskan with hard fists, and lonely

Dan got an associate’s degree in business, works for a bank and still deals a little dope on the side. Moss sells high-end real estate in the city. Spence moved to Brooklyn for the music and he’s got an EP on Bandcamp that’s pretty damned good. I’m the only one who stayed in town.

And now I am left wondering how The End of the Story might have been different, what more we might have found out, had ‘Vincent’ not been a presence in that flowered armchair, had Lydia not been conscious of him invoking rules: there shouldn’t be any intimate scenes.

Iggy Pop has a rocket in his pocket and he shore is gone pull it out.

We are the high school hallwalkers, the frequent fliers, the do not admit until disciplinary list, the back of the class, the front of the class where I can keep my eye on you, the laughing and fighting and nodding off 

At happy hour he compared you to Carrie Bradshaw and
you thought this was funny.

i took a girl to a donut shop after an art show

i bought her a donut and milk and then we sat in my car

we talked and ate donuts

she said she had thanksgiving dinner with a guy who shot two cops

Baby Hitler woke up angry. He sat up. They would be coming for him again. Who, he did not know.... more

You are twenty-six, so you know everything about anything.

Pizza Hut pays for my gas, and of course I eat for free whenever I get to one of our restaurants. They allow me fifty a day for lodging, but since we’re saving for that patio set I usually just sleep in the car if the room is over forty. In Iowa City it was hard to find something that cheap but Missouri is like motel central! 

Yes,we are parasites of the sun, but refuse to say so. We never mouth the same words twice. 

six years later and I only know how to be needed

Call me sensitive but if you dealt with a toothache
that made a destroyed country out of the left side
of your face, wouldn’t you cry your ass off

“The organism is made to self-regenerate,” she said as we walked to my 1980 Buick in the gravel lot.  “In this way it is unlike worn-out horses and old-ass cars.”

I am thinking about the lungfish’s two worlds—the wet one and the dry one—and about metamorphosis.  And I am thinking about strokes—about whether it’s the moment that the arm becomes weak that a person’s life goes into pause.  Or the moment that the blind spot sets in.

Now our privates got a timeline.

we’re all alone in our corner of need.

It’s customary in Italy to have food during happy hour. I ordered white wine but was nervous to ask for a plate. When I don’t understand what someone is saying I will just say no.

Latvia’s Baltic coastline is almost completely undeveloped except for a few fishing villages and some dilapidated concrete resorts for Communist Party officials.  A forest of black pines begins right at the edge of sixty-foot dunes.

Let’s touch hands across the rubble.