Please Hold

I’m patiently unraveling
on the phone while the automated service
explains overdraft and accrue
and rollover – I’m not talking to anyone
but I’m pleading nonetheless.
       I’m

The more time spent at the sunglasses booth, the more willing you are to endure pain and suffering just to feel human again.

First Week of April, Los Angeles
(as transcribed from the iCalendar “what really happened”)

1
got crab and salmon sushirritos with the ex and put on planet earth 2 right at the moment sir david

Peter wakes up first and texts me, hi baby, hi boo, hi honey pie.

And it was at that moment—seeing that light and realizing that other people were together in the world in that very same light while he was in an alley watching himself on TV—that he finally felt something: an overwhelming, honest and simple sense of sadness that felt like a beautiful release.

At eighteen I got two stars tattooed on my ankle. I used to tell people a variety of stories: they were falling stars, they were the stars from Peter Pan, they were the North Star and its unnamed

What I've written here is, of course, something that Kurt Cobain will never know. On April 8, the discovery of his suicide was 24 years ago in history. That's almost a quarter of a century, and I

This wasn’t supposed to be an essay.

I became obsessed with the idea of bunting. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wanted to make my own.

10,000 years from now

two men will be
digging
in the ground
and they’ll find
a frisbee
buried deep below the surface.

one man will look it over,
puzzled,
and turn to the other man
and

"I’m always looking for ways to pay more attention. I thought maybe I could be a better writer if I knew what private investigators knew, if I could see a clue for what it was. I’m still learning."  

to gain followers I use my body then / I lose them with my poems

After I turned thirty-five, the age of forty circled me like a shark. My dread of it intensified with each passing year. On my thirty-eighth birthday, I braced myself. The movement in the water had

The puppies are back at WBC, and I’m third in line. 

The machine sleeps in the corner. Its dreams are projected onto large white walls where we watch them and record our reactions.

while i / in half-lotus / pluck stubble from / my belly

When you’re sad, you go to the ballgame. 

i only do the poet voice / when i'm hungover

“Get in here!” yelled Grandma. “Carrot Head is gonna sing!”

Daisy was going to community college classes out on SE 82^nd and trying to figure out what direction her life should take. Her classes were Dental Hygiene, Religious Studies, and Ethics in Improv Comedy.

It’s the sun, I told myself again. Too much sun makes people too hyper, too happy, too sure of themselves. What we need is a little rain, some dark clouds, a berating storm. 

Rain drags its cage / through the neighborhood. You / see nothing but // trenches. Rusty shovels, / the alien rocks sprayed / like genitals. 

I came home from work the other day and my next-door neighbor, Charlie, was sitting on a lawn-chair under an oak tree in his front lawn, drinking a beer, smoking a cigarette. 

Charlie said, “Hey

Ironically, hours before we went to see Whoopi, I texted two friends from my bathtub that I didn’t think I would ever write another essay. It was “too hard.” “People only want to vilify you, so they look for words to use to that end, and ignore the rest of what you’ve said.”

For weeks after, I watched California burn / out my window & on the evening news & the ash // in my cheeks became the only way/ to pronounce home.