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Nov 2018
Dressed in a black and white polka dot dress

You eat pie while sitting on the floor.

There is a table at the center of your one-story house with three bedrooms in the living room.

It is somewhere up north.

I left

For the department store.

Airplanes, cars, President, everything.

A department store worker helped me as soon as I walked in.

“I saw an image of myself on a postcard yesterday.”

“Last night, I dreamt I was playing basketball.”

“Maybe it’s space.”

    “with fuzzy hair,
      

“To father time: jealously.”

Like a woman and man,
    the soccer game is over.
        I wish you knew
            that it weren’t.

And that life can be described as baking a cookie.

That there are several ingredients.

First, you need cookie dough and a cookie

Roller.

II

A ghost is in your living room.

We are speaking two different languages.

We are arguing.

There are books spread out on the ground.

Sarah is painting the inside of her first house.

She places a ***
                For a plant
              On a table, outside
                          her house

Her house is painted white.

The trees are slightly blowing

When I leave the department store.

III

I wore an apricot shirt

Made my way to

My grandmother’s house on Freeman Drive

Then left for my apartment on Broadway in San Antonio, Texas.

IIII

“We are doing the same thing
            only you’re much
             more beautiful
              & I’m a thief
              looking outside
                  my window.”

I could lose everything
And there would still be
Billions of people I’d never
Meet. And millions that
Would never like me.

V

“Can you paint?”

Your body is enough.

Follow him:

the music, jobs, eighth grade plays, backyards, an increase in salary, a doll house, the broadcast on FM radio tuned into channel 153, compacting everything into a jar, a very delicate and antique jar, cranberry juice inside the jar, a doctor, the maximum amount of money a lottery winner can win, jackpot, retail stores, a playground, leaning into discomfort.
May 9th & 10th 2018

taste
is what Emily wants
so she thinks of ships that set sail
and attempt to reach the edge of the earth

but she finds no refuge only what you bought her
because before I left for home
a person who is assumed to be a bike shop owner and who wants an increase in salary
would be better for Emily, than me, why would I think, to write that Emily wants to taste the paint of a ship?

Emily rides her bike and plays with dolls

and is full of life

but she

does not want to go to the bullfight

she
closed her window
last night
before going to sleep
&
To my right is a warning sign

& last night before Emily closed the window

she thought of the ship and how it would taste to tear the paint off of the ship
and eat it
    In Emily’s dream,
she
      wore an apricot shirt
I know this because I used binoculars to peer into her dream
from my apartment’s window
but I felt strange so I began to laugh and
left my house
                     for Broadway
& took 410 to a bookstore called Chevers, which houses
3500 books of a variety of sorts
and I drove past a hospital and
was satisfied with my fuzzy hair
and the image of Emily eating the paint from a ship

It was 11:46 am on a Tuesday and

after passing the hospital,

I passed a soccer game

where 13-year-old boys played against each other

then remembered I left the oven on in my apartment.

The trees were beautiful on the way to the bookstore,

but I ignored them, I could only think of Emily.

But still thought,

“if I focus, I can thoroughly
pull all of the petals off
        of the flowers
from the side of the road”

And at the bookstore, Chevers, I picked up a book of psychology:

       I learned about
the factors that increase the risk for youth suicide
and self-harm.
I stole the word ‘coercion’ from a book of poetry
I thought, “this word is my insurance”
But still hated and that’s why I drank too much alcohol
in my youth and why I’m weening myself off the drugs I stole from a group of teenagers
who lacked the awareness that by the breath of a distant friend and the light that shines on me
& Adam and Eve, & gods, fin, who in their day could go home to their cloud and see the sunset
or beach, from heaven, or maybe it’s the ocean, or maybe it’s the skin of the sheep I skinned
where upon you asked me about the aromas, the smell of the sheep, after it’s skin has been removed.

I wanted badly to correct the wrong, that was why I was doing drugs and drinking and lying on the 50-yard line of a football field.

“it is supposed to be metaphorical,” you know, it allows me to cleanse myself, I think, sitting in my apartment, thinking of my day at Chevers.

“to cure the illness that is a lack of self-control and poor impulse control.”

Because obviously I should have taken the drugs from the teenager and given them to a police officer, that’s what greater men do, anyways.
David Zavala
Written by
David Zavala  30/M/San Antonio
(30/M/San Antonio)   
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