we had been waiting a few and really didn’t know what to expect. Jennifer was running her fingers through her hair, racing them around the edge of her glass, fidgeting with the loops in her earrings. This was going to be her first despite the fact she told us otherwise. We all knew she was lying but we would rather she was with us when she broke into this business.
Okay, and what business is that? What utter crap.
He has been sleeping, walking, jogging, farting, living, smiling and he then fell, kissed, slapped, promulgated, signed the waiver, which more or less, rather, supposedly, definitely, hesitantly sealed the fate, lives, plastic, hemorrhoids of his car, fiancé, boyfriend, couch, curb.
Ok, what the fuck was that?
You have to live to write but you cannot write while living. Always the furthest away from a pen or writing instrument of any sort and the voice or voices, sometimes a gaggle come and drift and whisper things that are prophetic and beautiful and meaningful and something you’d want to write down to leave behind but no in the stillness of this night of this rampant boredom and mad desire to go home, so unsupervised, I can’t get a bloody decent word out.

1.i’m going through changes.
my body has never been at once so familiar and foreign. looking at her body go through it’s swelling and knowing what that belly holds, what precious DNA from this paired generation, returns the gaze to myself and how much has changed and how little has. i still don’t look like what i imagine myself to be, even after 31 years of looking.
2.nights like this.
nights like this are full of dead space and yearning for sleep. perpetually restless like the urge for a cigarette but knowing that the bitter smoke will never again cross these lips. it’s almost as if it’s become out of fashion to myself more than anything else. i’d love to have one, but i don’t know, the will to smoke seems dull now.
3.shorter than the rest.
shorter than the rest and happier for it. quick and not terribly incisive either. reading websites revolving around Ellis’ PLANETARY. Good stuff, not too heady but hits all the right points. i could have done stuff like that if i only had the attention and stamina for it. it’s always been a question of stamina.
4.he walks in to a bar (something i do often).
he walks into a bar and comes up to the stool. he looks around it for a bit, spins it with his left hand. he bends down close to seat and listens to it whirl. the bartender is cleaning beer glasses when he notices this guy. he shakes his head.
it just dies there.
5.of all the things.
of all the things i could have said, of all the things i could have wanted, there would have been something like this, a lake, a highway, a tree, of all the things that could have been, part of the telling and the wanting, of all the things, just these few, a dress, a table, an apple, of all the things i should have said, should have wanted to say but for the exhaust and the storm and the laughter, wanting to tell you of all the things; that surely would have been something.

1.
And somehow the butter rolls are the best in the morning with a cup of hot chocolate and a bit of a chill. Sometimes even an arcade game while big burly men talked about lumber and cement or something. They were big and fat and wore beards. I was always invisible and always on the way to somewhere else. In the morning, when the rolls were at their freshest and the world had only just begun to roll itself out into the light.
2.
And I can be very good at this, when things come together, when the traces of the logic begin to appear it gets exciting the way this used to, and it’s quick enough and simple enough in its design that, although the task might seem daunting at first, it’s ultimately done the moment it ever appeared. And what makes it more precious is the fact I’m the only one doing it and although I’ll brag there’s a secret rush and peak of joy that I cannot translate with gloating. And it’s good.
3.
And truly things cannot be better save for the lack of money, wouldn’t it be great to have a couple of bucks more, ok, maybe a couple of thousands. Ok, a million and then it’ll set everything straight.
4.
And The West Wing, while the banter is missing, a very keen sense of tension, drama and cinematography has filled the void Sorkin has left. At first it felt very technical, but as the season has moved forward, its gotten more slick and while I’d like to write emotional, it’s not, but rather empathic, less obvious stresses and just beginning to test the waters about what it’s characters are supposed to raving about.
5.
And although the nights are certainly strange I feel a new change come over me, slow and sure but I’m not sure if it’s for good or bad, another degree of coldness and sterility, and it doesn’t quite feel like that, something else entirely, as if each cell is being slowly replaced, which its supposed to, and where does the soul hang out anyway if not in your cells and isn’t quite entirely possible that every seven days or so, every three years or so, you’re an entirely different person from the cells up, even from the soul up. Shouldn’t you change? Wouldn’t you?
6.
And a baby shower tomorrow. And women and presents and laughter. And possibly children and the hope for. And later men, men and their tales of their wives giving birth to their children. And when it’s all done there’ll be just her and her belly and me, my wonderful life locked away within the heart of this woman who is about to offer our child to the world. And to the world I say, I beg, I plead “Please be kind to this child and all the rest if we’re lucky again, please be kind.”
7.
I still dream of horrible death and anguish. I still run with his death heavy across my eyes.

1.
It all ends and begins in tears doesn’t it? Tears of joy, of sorrow. Tears seeping out of the eye duct. Tears along the placenta, the uterine wall. Tears along the aorta.
2.
And they said unto him, ‘You will be promised many things. You will live with the knowledge that you are meant for greater things. You will live under the shadow of vast accomplishments you have yet to undertake. And it will be impressive. But take heart: the moment of your arrival will never come. You will wake everyday thinking that today will be the day of your eternal greatness, but it will never come to pass. You will sense at the edge of your fingers that you could have done something great today, but you never will. You’ve been graced only with the anticipation of what could have been. It will always nag you, it will always hang at the edge of your perception. That sense of more, that sense of greatness, that sense that you too, could have been a god, if only you weren’t you…�
3.
Barely the third day and I�m already tapped out. The fear of the meta-writing, the direct “I can’t write anymore” writing. No, none of that, but it isn’t easy. This was never easy.
4.
I wanted to spill out onto the floor like sunlight in an empty house and fill rooms with warmth and memories in the corners of walls and have stars of dust kick up and shimmer and the edges of staircases soften to the touch and the glass of the panes would not stop me and the floor boards would not stop me and even the foundations would greet me.
5.
How about a her? How about her? How has she been? Alright I guess. You don’t talk anymore? Of course we do, we’re married aren’t we? Well, you�ve both been getting around… It doesn’t mean we don’t talk, just that we don’t fuck….. Ok, that didn’t really work at all.
6.
Try again, try harder. From the book, a scribble: She collects the rent. It�s become a full time job between dropping off the kids at school and picking them up. Her routes weave in and around the West Side and she’s figured out a way to always been within striking distance of the school should the dean or the headmistress need to contact her. She also keeps an aluminum bat in the car because a wooden one will crack if you miss. It’s gotten its fair share of use, scratches criss cross the length of the shaft and the blunt tip is pock marked with craters and specks of what could have been blood. She keeps it in the trunk under the blanket that covers the spare lest the kids take it by accident and she finds herself needing it on her route. At least once a week if not a day. But today she shouldn’t be needing it all, just a stroll in the park, literally.
7.
But what happens here is, I get bored. Or I can’t see it further.

He was ecstatic with the joy of circumventing himself, or was that circumcising? What’s the difference anyway, it’s the rounding out, rounding about, severing through and lopping off, the cutting free as it were, the relief of one little less stump to worry about.
I cried often as a child, often to myself, often to the voices that comforted me and coaxed me to live one more day longer. Now I’ve gotten so used to living that the idea of death terrifies. I’m too comfortable in living, in my tidy thoughts as erratic and dismembered as they are. I’m not getting any younger and the more my youth escapes me, the more I wish to reboot the system and start over, knowing full well that it’s too late, all too late, I’m doomed on this path and there is no hope of ever living out my writing, or leading a writer’s life: peace, solitude and a little royalty check every month to cover the expense of a little house by the sea. Yeah, none of that for you boyo. You should never have gone to Bronx High School of Science to escape all those clowns who are now doctors and lawyers, never dropped out of high school because you couldn’t bear to live and all those clowns became stock brokers and scientists, never gone off to Albany (because John Jay was a good move although you fucked up there too, you got into a program that was excellent for the likes of you, that whole parallel and lateral thinking, that interdisciplinary shit you’re so keen on) and stayed for fucking five years investing in a doctoral program that was so mired in politics and pretension that by the end of it, by the time you busted your ass through the doctoral exams you couldn’t even write anymore, what good was that?
I feel a tremendous need to struggle out of this skin, rip the meat off the bones and exchange them for something else. I’ve grown fat, I am no longer lithe (I was always fat as a child, but then sprouted up and through rooftops in my teenage years; although I was no stunner then, you could see my cheekbones and the outlines of my abs), I am lethargic, suffering the beginnings of a mid-life crisis when I used to tell people I would not live past twenty.
I want a tattoo of my wife’s angelic face on my shoulder to comfort me when all the voices have left me, as they have been, one by one, over the years, leaving back alone in the darkness where they first found me, naked and churning, shivering, crawling, raking, waiting to breathe.
Mother, father please explain to me this blood in my veins, why it runs hot and cold, why I burn bridges and freeze out corners of my heart. Explain why I want to run away, not run backwards in time, but sideways and straight out of it, I want to keep my head together in death, even if that means living another life. Explain to me why there isn’t anything more than this and why this sack of meat lives so hard and true and clear like it’s all never supposed to end. Explain to me why when the world stops, I lose track of time and there’s so little time left even when there’s all the time in world? Explain to me when exactly I went mad because I cannot possibly be well like this. This is not the way I was supposed to leave the world, this is not supposed to be the life I would give my wife, my child. This is not supposed to be how things turned out in the end, especially when the end is nowhere near in sight.
Twist and twist it all around, trying to make the old sound new again. Reverb off the common sense and make the senses work to make sense of it. Everything old is new again only if you knock it out of shape.

in view of labors twirling on his tongue, he writes, he wishes he wrote more, he wished he lived more, sometimes he wishes for a life more than this one, where he was more than this one now writing the lament of writing a little less than one liked to, for living a little less than one liked to, for wishing for more than one would have taken the time to have wished for.
And sometimes, late at night, the terror grips me again, plucks my heart and fingers its valves. It’s only thirty years ahead at worst, but she laughs and says it’ll be like tomorrow and this memory will be like yesterday and i push all the breath out to keep from breathing death in.
I cannot write anymore about not writing or the desire to write or the lamentation of what i was and am and could have been. I should only write and be writing and think nothing else but the pushing on and her and between the sheets the fucking how good it was the other night, not nrew years night where she fucking me to make me cum there at the end tracing her finger along my nuts as she leaned back on top of me and i thought how unfair and i wanted more of it, but i knew she wasn’t having anymore of it and that’s what her on, what brought her fingernails on my scrotum and i thought how terrible unfair and ludicrous and terrifying to be bringing in the new year in this way considering that it marks you for the rest of the year, but not that time, the time before, where she was on top again and leaning out over the bed suspended like a bridge between ecstasy and something else that’s tender and soft and ain’t that just grand to feel something real when you’re holding her in your arms, suspending her across the shaft and you feel her lips, not the lips she smiles at you with, but the lips that accept your manhood for all little that it is, and it was so good because let’s face it you felt that you were so good and sometimes you need just that.
There he walks into a room and see that chairs toss asunder. I had helped him through that rough patch with her when she was stealing from their mother who might or might not have been my mother or aunt as well in another lifetime but it wasn’t the right time to ask about it besides that dog just got amputated from cancer and hobbled around.
I wish for things to stick themselves in my head like in Nylund’s Signal to Noise, where people speak to each other in metaphor’s but there’s also something not quite right about that and even he author himself writes the obvious of our times: the increasing complexity and strength of our communication devices brings about greater degrees of i(n)solation. I wish to be done with endings.
He walks into a room and find the phone ringing. He answers it although he hasn’t answered a phone in a long time. There is silence on the other end, a tangible quality like a back end of a window pane.
No, no that isn’t right either, but near the end of the page and I’m rusty.