I did not raise my glass in toast to the passing of Gene Hackman.

I don’t fully recall when I realized that the smoke detector was going off

Other times it’s about motels in Nebraska or 
gum ball machines or a close-up of a woman’s 
face.

They always think I’ll wave to them.

The glass always refilling / and fracturing his life

I have been waiting to become a better writer so that I can understand them.

The forecast predicted devastation,
So I scattered sandbags around my house,
Closed the window,
And waited for the deluge.
Fingers gripped my hair and
Yanked me back like a bucking

Loneliness feels good

The first shall be last and the last shall be first, Frank said / that’s from episode 42 / 
of the telly series Kung Fu, /  ‘This Valley Has Terror’

Sex is the opposite of being a novelist, and I would rather live between them.

Being an artist is just another phase, / like a kid who eats the glue sticks

Maybe next era I’ll get to experience love.

Stripper show / Hostess bar / Karaoke club

But there’s no cup, no / kitchen. Just one mouldy / statue, dreaming of television.

Torn textbooks at Widener Library or seeping 
Inkwells those Cajal axons 

out in the Everglades, no resurrection
just a rotting boy's corpse

the day i was born i was yellow and poisoned and anxious.
and they put me under a sunlamp and burned it out of me.

Drug Plane

I was fifteen, then sixteen, then twenty. My high-school friend was my now college roommate. His stepfather was less mysterious but more compelling. He was having trouble with his

We are like dogs in a dog park, smelling each other, breathing together

We're asked to think about examples of unconscious bias and I think about the guy who goes to

Heaven but it's Chinese.

Last spring was the last spring.

Neither a drop of white wine into the danube canal, nor a gunshot through the roof of my mouth, but something in between

I am more deserving of your love than he is. My heart beats twice the size of others. 

I put away my matchsticks / and hammer. You remain, standing / the same as you were.

when I laugh, you perk up
like a misted lily