it's hot in a restaurant with the strangers you've since been stranded with

(look! You Finally Did It!)

and everybody knows your name but the symbolism of individualized letters with glottal stops and teeth-******* pauses and dyslexic lingering lisps is lost on them, they have their own letters to think about, don't you know?

(hundreds of pillows fly out my ears in increasing sizes, so i must be dreaming - Right?)

Yahtzee! Soccer! Give it the old college try!

(abstract oils crash and burn in a watchtower atop of your New Life)

It's Something to do with your Mouth, It's Something to do with your Hands, but we couldn't tell you why $2.50 wasted matters more than four months and the casual flinging of my (god forbid)

i n n o c e n c e

(you're happy and i'm unconscious, so in theory we're on the same wavelength - Right?)

can you assure me that everyone has two decades of nauseating mediocrity
or no - is it just me?
we Need coffee! we Need love! dread has to be evenly distributed - don't leave your years of it at my door!

(i don't want anybody's advice unless it's on how to fashion a fully-functioning noose)

tiny lips and long socks - i can't stop being in love with the whole two-eye/two-ear/nose/mouth ordeal but i'm utterly left-handed in my lust and i swear to god both hands are empty - but that's something else entirely

(back to where we started from, in bleeding headlights swimming on deserted streets)

'just wanted to throw an XO your way' say the eyes of every crossword connection i bend over backwards to trying to cater it to my thoughts of you

(For Sale: a storage unit of journals filled with sketches of you - it's pink and mushy and curled inside my head, if you're into that)

and it's only when we're in a bed together at 3:26 AM that belongs to neither you or me that i can consciously eliminate emptied emotions and neatly file them onto typeface notes hidden in bouquets decorating the dismal-ities of my freshly-planted tombstone

(fuse our bodies together and let's make this sarcophagus a necrophilia-polis)

e p i l o g u e

Smoke billows from steel chimneys and stolen O-faced lips as I try to validate myself alongside your bare necessities

The slang of the times coincides not with language, but once more - with feeling!

Seven seasons and six leading ladies gone so that I know summer's really over / and I've called you 'the one' more times than I've read it in TV Guide descriptions late-night reruns of all the Friends you have at 3 AM
Who
Aren't

me.

(What are we?)

I don't want to be existential but I'm existing and here is you here is me and here is everyone else, we are uncomfortably permanent as a 20-year stint in a cell made from changing leaves and whitened teeth

(P.S. I want to bash your disproportionate ******* head in)

Sloppy Joe's on my brain as I use the sticky fingers of my undying affection to wipe off the traces that She Left On You - and I open all the windows but the breeze is just perfume

("I don't understand makeup", you say as I paint over eight midnight love-***** or I guess you could call them hickies)

Let us talk about! Numbers, locations, dates and Age -
Or the S of your body with elbows against the wall
The nowhere of the place I wanna be
That one time? With that one thing???
(You're just a minor and I can't do this)


My sob story is
Written in blushing haikus
Like tea in Japan

Bonjour, mon Cheri, mon petit Chou!
The doorbell rings with a solemn telegram:

- this just in -
I am exactly like most girls - in civilizations lost, or civilizations in other civilizations, Italy hiding in Toronto and a government hiding in a shameful self-promotion, and 20 seconds later I'm a poly-sci major (incorrigible!)

- 911! 911! 911! 911!
What's my emergency? What's YOUR emergency? But really, what is my emergency? And when it comes to that, What's in an emergency - an aristocracy in high-waisted shorts, an ice cream social (media) scream - lets back the car out and park and loop and inevitably end up in a straight line caterpillars away from
(The truth) - (but more of that later)

Cross-continental cigarette and now I'm running out of material to trade it for. I am lonely, can't you see? A fair trade, for a night with me-

(**** me so hard I can't walk, **** me over so bad I can't detour a one-track mind)

I am not the one Hemingway prepared you for, I will not blow smoke rings in Spain or wander the streets of Paris, I will sit right here lounging in a plaid vinyl sinkhole and carry myself with delusions of grandeur

(Beyond novels unread - yet sadly written - by the unwashed and falsely educated masses)

Life as an existential film, life as woe is me in backwards bus terminals. Life as when you marry someone you hate and life as cold tempura on a *****-stained tablecloth. Pass the peas, please.

Sixty years ago, you could have loved me
- a sailor, - a trophy wife, - an 'okay, fiancé' in a sarcastic legacy
A turn of the century turns you around and turns you into a (skate! jam! live in a van!) type of person that I am vastly uninterested in but just tryin' to be sad about somethin'

- I am sad about your big feet, your cuffed trousers, all the places I didn't want to run into you at and not letting that stop me from carting my coffin to Kansas City art museums
(Your love poems to me must be dried in caked-on mud from tires pulling away)

Did you know you're an accident?

- The whole crowd laughs, someone get me a microphone!
(Someone! Get me anything your mouth has touched!)
- I'll bury a vial of your organic germs in my hometown backyard to find later, when you're dead as your dangling doorknobs and disguised by giggling gargoyles (you are welcome, by the way)

Ultimate hide 'n' seek warrants a worthless existence and a holy trinity of the same name(s)
(The dog is under the bed)
(You are locked out on the back porch)
(I am fetal position in a parked car)

- Can we put this on the Christmas card?

Happy Twentieth, Darling! I Love You Very, Very, Very, Very Much.

You and I
You
And
I

- I
Could drown myself in melted polar ice caps, or illusions of Niagara Falls (or does it?)
Could join a nudist colony
Could dismember my body parts 'recreationally'
Could (or will) document my own downward spiral/lay eggs in vast and immeasurable labyrinths/where the paradox of my self-pity mingles with my bragging/swaggering teen angst and date!-mate!-procreate!- into a thousand descendants of my rotting fleshhhhhh

- You
Present yourself in -
Hallways rambling in front of me with asylums spilling into corridors of confusion
Rrrrrrriiipppp of either paper pulling from notebooks or flesh pulling from bone
Virtual college applications tabbed over with two different Buy Your Own Russian Wife! websites and ignored by your -loving parents-
An arrogant 18-year-old boy standing before the Committee of Elders (pleading insanity)
Twenty-four permanent markers with generic names
The pseudo-poetic lure of "Call _ For a GOOD TIME" graffitis on the bathroom wall of a Whole Foods you spend six weeks jacking off in

- Look, that's great and all, but
I think you are a (beanstalk), no time to (talk), less of a (walk) and more of a climb - to reach your face, and when I lean to kiss it (fee fi fo fum) I smell the blood of a human one

(I'm tired of stooping and I'm tired of looking at old people)

You
And
I
Could have Been Anyone!
But no,
Just more of the same.

Nothing gets crossed out -

A collection of the worst jokes you ever told (something about LSD and shellfish) rolls and rolls and rolls and rolls into dust bunnies (whispering my secrets) snatched up and molded with vegan butter until a collective comet increase, increases, IGNITES into flames and is suddenly the rising sun you rose up underneath from six times in my bed where the butterflies in my stomach shivered and shook and made their way to the walls at eye level with your tiny ears

-
Tie a tin-can telephone to the door of your own personal world from my mailbox and I'll leave a message on your carrier pigeon (answering machine?)

I'm confused.

"Jennifer wants you to know that she wants you and her to move into a postage-stamp house in a postcard of Italy - she says to make sure you know that the house has no walls and lots of ladybugs."

-
I think we're breaking up - "What do you mean, you know what I look like without my face? Jesus, Jenny, you're ******* nuts."

-
It's okay though, I got like, ten cents for recycling those cans. Anyways

CRASH! From behind a junkyard ~

Sounds that I will drown out with my erectile-dysfunction pills.

-
There's a candle from something called (Ireland?) here and I can't ******* blow it out, there's like twenty, or twelve years probably, you are repeated here doing sunrise stretches in fluttering orange flames

Green slime oozes from the cracks in your shower tiles and I try to pin it back up with clothespins; just in case it helps you save the world. By the way - I will write my name in the unethical fog left behind an Indian-ocean's worth of water and say I fell asleep, wasn't me, astral projection did it (!!)

-
(Are you still with me?)

-
The last chapter - the Queen of England will buy your burial site under a fake name and I will fingers crossed decompose into one looooong-winded aperçu.