I need no prompt to zone out and dissociate or become unattached.

At nighttime, creaks of wood tinker like tall tales. There is less I can see. I am too reliant on my eyes to tell the whole story. Sound is a sightless animal. The house I live in was probably built in the 1960s and I've noted it doesn't croon with the wind like other places.

Does speech require a mind? The human voice cannot be as massive an instrument as we make it. As wholly self-serving creatures, do we hear ourselves between cracks in this patchwork planet?

Is midnight just a silly word for numbers, like any other?

An empty house reclaimed by nature and subject to her laws has no want of questions and answers. Shapes are not made whole by human voice. If I could speak to my great-grandmother now, as I did six days before her death, would she tell me what she always told me? Would she wish I'd go back to church?

Raindrops paint my window a blurry gray. There is not a straight line to see through. Each ripple, and in it a reflection. I can piece it back together; I can see my small self seeing through it, and contains therein some middleplace that continues to escape me.

A full moon is hidden. Missouri is covered by clouds, like a wet blanket. The house will creak under water's weight , and when the clouds disperse and nighttime sings brighter it will creak still. This house is not a thing of nature.

It should not be here.

You smoked your throat gone.

I'll sit in bed opening and closing my Opinel No. 8 and stare at an unread compilation of a then-alive poet's correspondence with a then-and-still-dead poet and wonder at the cover art, a fishing-line-thin threaded rope that could well be tied in a slipknot. Tendrils that look like loose straw scattered thirty different ways.

He said You can't **** your life away and there are many ways to do that. I'm stuck inside a small bedroom dreaming or hallucinating an open space, streams flowing from nowhere near and flat space so full of sky it is sin to call it empty. The world can be hot and fast;  I am bad at resting. I don't sleep well. I can float a river and not once hear it moving.

You drank and dissected your drinking so it could masquerade as something under your control. We all are guilty of this at some point. In some way or another. I am lucky to sit in my bedroom and write that the next two years of my life have well been mapped. I do not pout, there is no malice here. My head is close, fastened between my small shoulders. I share no heart with Yesenin.

You can't **** your life away he said he thought. These things change. *But you can!

Outside the crop has wintered,
tall husks of green lopped over
and fumbling for sunlight.
        There are rules to the arrangement.

The limits of energy and
abundance, lost somewhere in
a fray of hot sound, cold
        Frame for the crop to weather.

Let it slip away. Humble yet
whorish for warmth, bare skeleton
of being from which to frame the
        Praying, hand scraping concrete.

Find that voice. Put it in a box.
Punt that box into oblivion, a fire
of sunlight, warmth, a burning skeleton
        Begging for life; hollow shell.

Eyes pickled and raw,
we have wasted undo hours
stealing sleep like thieves.

It has been one year
since my last haiku; one more
year spent trapped in skin.

I told him what it was to
tread water and he, for the
longest time, believed me.
My friend is a musician and
the instrument that chose
him is the keyboard, with
it's near infinite possibilities,
incarnations, iterations.
Different lives, so to speak.
It is a craft that as it is
learned learns you. Small
flash of contact. Text
message. Unreturned call
with voicemail attached.
We've learned to sing over
the phone. I hope that doesn't
ring flat.

For what it's worth I've come to find that people and things ****** over make like lead pockets. Old business is just old business and yet the mouth stays sour, curdles at its ends like milk left out. I wash my hair and wash it again.

How do you **** a city? Not a short-change of ideas or institutions. A city. People, granite columns. Street lamps. Long lines of wooden benches. Car horns.

Bags and bags of bug-out gear: drop point knife; feather-stuffed bedroll; one dozen pouches, depositories. The **** is the escape.

The drop point.

Some thing in all of us wants a way out. It aches for freedom. Messy, nasty freedom, sweet as it is.