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

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.

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

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.

Our lovemaking is a demilitarized zone.

Shit, is this what the Zoom room people mean when they say fantasy addict?

This final image crushed me. It was a forewarning of what identity destruction can lead to if we
don’t truly understand ourselves to begin with.