Weeds have taken over his life, they’re everywhere, in his yard, in his mind, in his teeth. The dentist peers in, fingers the gumline, sticks in his fist, tugs the front row. He laughs, well what can I say, your gums are lousy. My neighbors argue midday into the street, she says to him, I am disgusted with you, I can’t even look at you; and their dog squats over my curb and we all watch helplessly. Even now, any random phone call brings it all to a head.

spent, he lies and tells you where he’s been. nowhere special, she says, and lies, lazy hand across his forehead. i’m so thirsty, you tell him. he laughs at me. she told you to say that, didn’t she. i told him nothing, she says, drapes a hand across your shoulder. i shudder and push down the hunger to rip them all up.
something like this, all day long.

A: How do you go on?
B: What, you mean go on living?
A: Yeah..
B: Man, I’m just waiting for the opportunity to see a baby carriage roll in front of a bus so i can jump and push it out of the way and get run over instead.

their laughter is ultimately a daunting thing: i can only listen, not watch, only listen. and there is something terrible about that, to be some far removed but longing to be within that laughter. i can only listen and not bare to watch because they in turn would see me. they would see that there is nothing funny about me at all.

we dream of angry welts and children with bitter skulls. I will have all of it, she said and shoveled handfuls of ripped nipples still sore and twitching from new born babies resilient and faithfully callous. and the men watched sipping martinis from a bygone age where they played the saxophone with hands twice the size of janitors and the girls sashayed across ballroom floors still slick with last night’s meal. he cooed into her ear, you should come here more often. she laughed, honey i cum whenever i please.

everyday seems a sticking point: you cannot move forward and you cannot change what’s happened. she says to me in the dark, touching my brow, what happened? i lie, staring at the tv screen, late night amnesia, late night stupor. outside summer heat has broken into a resigned chill: fall is coming and nothing got accomplished.

we become disentangled in the rain. it pours. in the bar he says, lean closer to me above the noise of empty chairs and rattling windows. i drew him with shades of logic and mayhem and we barreled through the night like angry boys happy to be free of our mothers’ ceaseless worrying and our father’s heavy boots.

the better part of days and weeks are imagined corpuscles of knowledge buried deep within the skin like ants breeding buffalo and other magnificent expositions of extinction. this event like no other hand scratching at the wrist of this progression into her night and her many many accoutrement of self denial and men lingering for one spittle more. he says to me in the bar, why don’t we ever talk like this, we don’t we ever talk like friends? i find myself smashed into telephone conversations that i barely make out what she says to me while staring straight into the headlights of oncoming traffic. laughter rumbles through my rib cage and i gleefully spit out my teeth.

we dream of ways out of the heat into exhaustion. i swat spiders that crawl along knobs weaving weak webs that crack in the wind. my daughter, capricious as ever, makes lists of the best parts of her day. they are always imagined. while my son has begun to crawl up and over the furniture leaving little teeth marks wherever his grip had slipped. we remember none of this waiting for the sky to break and i grab her hand in the dark. all of this is too real to keep. all of this snaps me into a million pieces.

i had many things up my sleeve inside and out and she with her lilac in her hair, always one mind you, always one and purple at that, hitched into her hair above an ear all a glitter with stones and hoops and hooks of earrings, all the better to ignore you with dear, she would say slinked into a tight black dress that left little room for anything else, and we hit the town square in the face and she would claim righteously that she would rocket us all of out of here, that we would all be riding her coat tails and all i wanted was to ride this feeling she gave me when she smiled like that, all stupid and goofy and free of whether she was wearing one lilac or not.