other byproducts are produced
sticky sweat, the stink of loneliness

Sarah has just been promoted at the publishing house, and I realize she thinks she is doing her job at this party

Smile in heavy make-up, feeling like a pill is stuck in your throat.

/pəˈzeʃ.ən/

One morning I woke up with my right scapula in my mouth. You would think that is physically impossible, but in the case of demonic possessions it is actually more normal than not.

A snag with Monday is I have to neck all three of my Subtext in one go. Each under the tongue. The man who administers, Sven, can’t be arsed to say why but he’s a pure archcretin.

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.