“My grandma drinks that,” the kid ahead of me at Duane Reade snarks at my six-pack of Ensure bottles.

It’s me and Helena. Helena and me.

She feels bad for being taken aback before; she really is a very nice doctor.

The attic room in the student town of Ordrecht went for 365, 52 euros monthly, not including the safety-deposit, called borg in Dutch.

“Lucky boy, just too late. Because we have crisis in Holland,

In the mornings, the woman sees her husband off to work in her night dress, sometimes with curlers in her hair. After he leaves, she always lights a cigarette and stands with the glass-paned storm door cracked open. I can tell the inside of their house smells like knock-off Estée Lauder and menthol smoke.

I fucked his heart, ruined the fitted sheets,
flamingos left erect in a pool of afternoons

other byproducts are produced
sticky sweat, the stink of loneliness

We drank the acid. I immediately felt fucked.

I imagined finding him hanged beneath the creak of a taut rope as often as I didnt.

Do you ever get mad
and want to 
hit something?

This marriage project
What a blast

A few minutes later I was presented with a tall, condensation-covered glass, containing an opaque, dark-green liquid that looked like it had been skimmed off the surface of a stagnant pond. I took a tentative sip.

How they stabbed me and got away with it!

I guess my approach is not to take myself too seriously, which sounds kind of dumb and obvious, and just to write the sort of book I most like to read, which is usually something heavy but also light on its feet, fast-paced and horny, and generally not too full of itself.

Sometimes they say, You can’t really teach someone to write a poem, in which case you might answer, Well,
not you.

Our lovemaking is a demilitarized zone.

i don’t think there will be booze
for sale, the style writer says, 
because it’s a synagogue

in the midst of a historic crisis, i ride my bike to the river

I vomited
up a prophecy in a dive bar,
inhaling hot dogs.

I can tell she’s not convinced. But I’ve been Googling symptoms: confusion, nausea, loss of appetite, changes in sleep patterns, visual hallucinations, erratic behavior.