What'd You Call Me?

After forty years of ineffable happiness, he opened his head to the outside world, matter (gobi) sliding down his sooty cheek; mandarin orange wedges slinking off a plastic spoon, and he is null, so much bulk nothing (so much bulk mass). An ending too good for [x], he thought, let alone life.

It’s a fish, I suppose. Hydrogen melting off its fins, so starlike…perhaps a star…fish shaped, something watery, floating about it. It moves, swallows smaller stars—they fuel its flares so brilliant and fin shaped.

This is me. The old me, living slapping the shoes off your socks, over my shoulder yelling: “but who says ‘crone’?” Or ‘curmudgeon’? Who says ‘integument’, for that matter, when ‘rind’ will do?

Bert Lahr Didn't Want His Pants to Fall

It’s a simple enough task, explaining the truth, once you’ve got it. Not to the molepeople who think you’re the molepeople—all y’all fine thousands, stiff and suffering not one lick from your blindness.

All pain and suffering (life is) Lazare said (for me). He thought I should know, in case I might be enjoying myself. “Get out from behind the pillow; it gets worse!” And it does, but no terror fits the sinking in your chest: Kant, midlife, lecturing for tips—how philosophy has suffered from the lack of tips. The panhandlers in the park might know, or some shy rescue dog eating the park’s leavings wholesale and with ravenous lockjaw.

My friend, the clever one, with the child’s body and the woman’s hips—crooked toes on her feet from beating the souls within the tar and having each night something new to do—black streaks from eyes to chin from her office job, crying toner. We are moving this wreckage forward for history. In time these pages will be filled with whatever I can dig up—please be not too harsh with the frame—do what you will with the content.