Boyish Pursuits

The ocean is a junkyard of sheet metal
with headlight eyes and grillwork teeth,
wave after rusted wave dragging hood
emblems and hubcaps to and from the beach
like so

We tell each other the names / of our dead. The cities we live in // are gnawing then burying / the cadavers of opulent dreams.

At my father's funeral
I thought I was in heaven because that's where I was told he was.

Liking the world is not easy, though sometimes it is / a large wave that carries you.

Before, the possums’ noise had been an angry hissing, but now their voices were becoming sweet, even musical, the world of them trilling and humming into their endless, private night.

In the end, there are five bear cubs underneath your porch. You name them after U.S. Presidents. Taft dies of starvation.

I wake up in a wheelchair. I wake up on display. 

It is April 2^nd, 2014. I tell me I told us. I’m happier. The fourth sentence is treating it like home. Our cats are brothers with dichromatic eyes. 

I remember Marc said, you’re wet just because of the humidity.

Joni says, “Time moves so fast these days.”

                  Joni is somewhere between three and four times my age and I am twenty-two.

Located at Oak Park Rd. and Forest Preserve Rd. in Chicago,
you must park about a mile away and make the trip to the en-
trance on foot. 

hell you know it’s only a question of dainty morsels
you can eat dog food probably and survive

It is something like a nuisance that you exist. But I have headphones to help ignore

Y’all’re fine ass. Y’all got dark in the pill-bottle-orange sun

I went to a poetry reading and a guy I’d slept with once read a list of everything he’d done in Los Angeles and I wasn’t on it. 

I imagine her
walking into my bedroom—Drunk

between her legs, the whole world
the same temperature; 

I ask the sun to call me at night on my walk home. Everyday I become a little more scared. I recognize people and cars and it makes me nervous. My mother told me girls are most likely to be

Don't high five me for drinking a 40.
Don't ask me for a Newport.

there are days without. Not quite a gap in whatever they call it, the space-time continuum or circadian rhythms or the tidal pull of every single thing, not quite, but noticeable enough to know what’s not here, that others are not here,

Instead I see embroidery, lace-making or metallurgy, fine filigree of rusting swing set against wood, the vertical birdfeeders foregrounded, but so close my eye misses them at first. I don’t know what to call this world anymore.

I want to call you and sing the Prince song, discuss the proportions of his tiny frame, imagine his tongue together, stay on the phone for hours like we used to. Those days are gone. 

I imagine Temperance Brennan's annual gynecological exam might go something like mine: If you're not finding time to eat, you must not be having a lot of... Are you seeing anyone right now?

I lie night after night
With the only one I hate more than myself

Artisanal meth is amazing