Three hits and down I went. Into the floor. Puddled and leaking through the downstairs neighbor’s ceiling.

I feel too sorry, I’m too tired, and though I desperately want to change my life, I’m not in a position to, which is to say I’ve taken up the position of defending my nondefendable position. Position underneath position.

Flung like emotions, tilting to night . . .

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

“We come here once a month,” the woman added. “To spice things up.”

Maybe next era I’ll get to experience love.

The air felt so heavy that it would suffocate all language.

Stripper show / Hostess bar / Karaoke club

‘Eaten.’ He rectifies, his tongue flips out and recoils in saurian swiftness.

Fully, religiously, rigorously outline, and enjoy the surprises along the way.

Pull your elastic around your wrist / and laugh like a grown woman.

I don’t want anything serious. But come to raves with me. Take drugs with me!

And by:

Elizabeth Ellen’s Instagram account (@shortflightlongdrive). Come for the cougar stalking the line between avant-tasteful and not not ironic literary hot mom, stay for zooming in on the books in the background. Elizabeth Ellen’s Instagram. I’m liking it for the captions.

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

My surroundings, though I’d moved through them prolifically as a child, seemed then like an opaque screen placed there to conceal something from me

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.