There’s an impulse to reduce the Tommy and Pam love story to easy pop-psychology terms: they had a trauma bond, he had a Madonna/Whore complex after she became a mother.

We drank the acid. I immediately felt fucked.

If, for instance, Jezebel had to use the men’s room for some reason, I would rather pee on myself.

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

But there's no blood
It's all gone, I'm dry

That’s why we are “in relationship,” to deliberately alienate each other’s unhappiness—to build an incredible shrine to unhappiness that would be seen for miles in a flatland, if such a shrine could be visible.

I spent the next couple hours grooming myself and getting drunk. I was sick all the time back then.

Do you ever get mad
and want to 
hit something?

a howl of anguish and a bolt from the, a bruise, and yes, even lurid strangulation on the— 

why it’s positively gothic darling, really!

I tolerated Marcus and Haley because I knew their drill. Marcus would pick me up with drugs coursing through his system

Hallucinated a flaming forest as if lucid dreaming around 9 p.m. Shit myself. Barfed orange slushy chunks.

I blast the airhorn before the lump on the floor knows what’s going on.

My wife watched me walk headfirst into a mirror.

Why can’t time be both? History repeating 

Itself but making progress too?

Now there is a skeleton outside my window. And skeletons on all the dating app profiles.

This marriage project
What a blast

The face in my mirror keeps getting older –
Into the face of the man who beat me

I reminded myself that I spent just as many lonely afternoons in the State Library of Victoria with a pile of international Vogues as I did at a Goodwill in the Valley.

I thought maybe I would learn something about how to be less judgemental, or something.

Every winter, the Jersey Shore freezes into an old car in the driveway, tarped and bricked until May.

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.

He came down my throat, I slurped it all up.

I didn’t want to write this essay, but I know somebody will publish it and feel good about themselves for platforming a disabled voice.