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.

The rent-paying, however, would be largely theoretical: his savings long since spent, he would be using the money she and her husband endlessly credited him without interest

“My son was murdered last year. His bride murdered him.”

Hmmm... When Butcher Bear was murdered, he was probably cutting meat.

You can’t ban my books for saying this shit because no one bought them anyway. Some guys have all the luck. 

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

How they say something doesn’t wink at an audience, this caws its eyelids off. What we got? Mad Men? True Detective? Those shows are about acting. (Sometimes about writing in service of plot. Oh, True Detective, almost, so close until the final explanation cribs us all.)

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

Where the fuck are the collected plays of Ron Allen? The police have won, that’s where.

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 had my bags packed and was getting ready to leave with two insane-seeming girls who offered me sex in exchange for a ride to Cleveland when a few patients stopped me and essentially pushed me into the lecture hall. I don't know why I didn't put up more of a fight -

I googled “Karl Ove Knausgaard AND Nicholson Baker” and didn’t find much. A review of My Struggle from The Monthly, an Australian magazine, compared some of Knaugaard’s reflections to “Seinfeld’s

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

Can you teach an eighteen-year-old trauma? 

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

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

Imaginary Audience, who is messing with whose head? Can therapy make one worse than one was before going in?

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

Pretty girls appeared from behind huge wooden poles below the boardwalk.

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. 

We ride in pairs to the stars and look up but flourescent rainbow strips make the everlasting dim.

Cockroaches

This was a sign as far as I was concerned. The high water mark. The North American standard for being a shitbag.

A plague of the poor and dirty.

So when we started to see

It’s an uphill battle to transition to a lifestyle of blunt objects.  

I imagine her
walking into my bedroom—Drunk

between her legs, the whole world
the same temperature;