the buzz of cards and everyone becomes eights and aces and flush draws. i hug my daughter and all i think is you’re a pair of jacks. i pick up my son and rub my face into his belly and his laughter reminds me of a flush. i sit across from my wife with our daughter laying across her and our son razzing on my lap and all i can hope for is a full house.

when an israel day care center decided to tack on a fee for parents who were late in picking up their children, the number of these late parents increased rather than decreased. it turns out that once you made it a financial transaction, the social/moral stigma of being late for your child was removed.
in another study, where a six pack of coke and a plate of dollar bills was left out in the open unattended on each floor of a college dormitory by the end of the day the six packs were consistently taken but the dollar bills were left untouched. it turns out the more disassociated the crime was from monetary theft, the more likely it would occur.

freakonomics
predictability irrational
the black swan – taleb
the age of turbulence

everyday like this, the madness of it, outside breathing yearning that one thing more, always the one thing more, never forget it, the choice, the choices before, everyday and another, again and again, to live, to choose to live, to love, to dream, to be, whomever you are, where you are, not just another stain, not just a mulching machine rift and saddled with mistakes and regrets, a being machine, a making machine, soft and hard parts, bone and skin and desire and grief.
i have always been badly tuned to the pain and joy within me, such highs and lows that the whipping had me bouncing off the walls to a dance only inside my head.

so he scratches at the dream for the dream the way sick men do their lesions to get the blood out to get the poison out he scratches feverishly to escape what he has built to bring himself and them and all that he loves into a better place better than what he is made of but all he finds all he is left with after he’s taken the last set of crumpled one dollar bills out his pocket is colorful pieces of perforated cards promising nothing other than the scratching itself

the night, the night. it beckons me, promises me anonymity, a safe haven to forget everything, to disappear. she asks, is it really that easy to leave us, to leave all of us behind? i pull from my cigarette and sadly smile, that’s why i’m still here. and to speak it makes me dust, to breathe it reveals i was never the man she thought i was. i was never half a man at all.

she says to me, i’m afraid that you might be faking it.
and i feel tendrils snake out from under my ribs and clench around my neck and smother my mouth until i choke and a current shoots through my spine and i secretly pray that one day i suffer like she has, that I whip myself into the same torment she has endured.

he falls into sleep with his children in his arms and his wife by his side. he awakes, startled but rested. in the dark she whispers, you are home, you’ve always been welcomed home.

deny it all you want: desire lingers like a stain. years go by and there’s no erasing it, a scar on the skin that only fades but turns a brilliant white in the sun. i tried to turn away from you out of fear, out of an imagined loneliness only to find myself in you. shattered meat, a ghost of a man, held together by your belief, your religious tenacity to never let us go.