It eats at me, this singular question. It repeats in my head, over and over—how can I desire what I already possess? I look at the books on my shelf and the coffee table, and I want to love them completely. I want to never buy another book. I look at the TV, a moderately sized HD set already obsolete, but what a fantastic machine it is, and though I've owned it for years, can I desire it? Or do I want something larger, something 4K? I'm trying to desire the objects I own, so when the day comes, when my singularity comes to an end, and I'm waiting for Her to come home, I will be lovesick, anxious, feverish, pure in my desire.

I've been in relationships and fantasized about one-off affairs. I've had one-off affairs and fantasized about something whole, something reliable.

This TV is watchable and this book is readable.

I think a woman is inherently better at desiring what's in her possession. She gives life, she creates, she's given to infrastructure, and future-building. A man destroys. A man conquers. A man stands in the corner of a room with a drink in his hand and recounts his destructions and conquests. You're a woman. Can you tell me how it's done?

Every true crime documentary resides in me.
Binge used to be tied to drinking. The language, I think,
is evolving, and I walk the black part of town at
night on a double dare from a lady poet whose
lexical purview lies somewhere between her
**** and the moon. I'm a beacon of fairness,
fair trade coffee stains my teeth, my lenin pants
imported from Bali are ethically made, and I speak
in a respectable and thoughtful half whisper
like the women of the QVC.
I return to the loft free of gunshot wounds
and love my lady poet thin and love my lady poet
tall and she says confusion is the only sustainable
state of being and I say I can agree with that and
she says she's been thinking about transitioning
and I say into more responsibility at work? and she
says haha no. Into a man.
And three weeks later I watch her read a poem
entitled "Traffic My **** Transgender *** to Heaven,"
she goes home with one, two, three Sylvia Plath lookalikes,
and I get swabbed at the doctors and I get prescribed
a moderate dose of Effexor and I speak in high school
Spanish to my office crush — she's from Venezuela, I think.
Power. Control. Stockings, I tell her, I have a thing for stockings
and pink cotton socks. One more drink and I'll hit my
groove. Chill. Power. Control. Put on that soul song I like.
Didn't I do it, baby?

My body's on the chair.
The balloon's tied to the lamp.
It wavers and spins. There's a smell,
I'll admit, and the flies have
already left and been.
The small world outside
continues, no need of my
permission. The bluebirds,
the children, the dozers—
I listen. No dreams,
no memories, no love,
no hate, no suffering,
no pleasure, no propagate.

I.

I lay beside the canals in Esmeralda, city of water.
For hours a shadow and an oar and a boat approach,
and in the distance unseen girls hum a melody,
a melody not wholly unlike the sound of the lapping waves.
The sun rises and sets in a matter of moments.
My skin crinkles, molts, regenerates as fresh
as a babe's. I think of father, of mother, the words
not the people. My hands move now on their own.
The left points to the Saint Cloud Bridge and I say,
Saint Cloud. I'm in my body but outside it. A little god.
A deliberate historian. I record everything.
I think I always did. My right hand waves
to an acrobat on a clothesline. Behind
the acrobat a small stucco home crumbles
and rebuilds itself. My right palm
covers my mouth and I kiss it.
The veins running down my arms
appear to be filled with different colored inks,
reds, blues, greens. A shadow and an oar and
a boat approach, closer, closer.
A single swallow flies above the water, dipping down,
wetting the tips of its wings, climbing upwards over the
balconies, the rooftops, the sun setting, the sun rising,
blessing its flight. My right hand traces my uneven
and ever shifting face. What did I look like as a boy?
Did I have many friends?

II.

The shadow offers his hand, eases me aboard
his small boat. We push off back the way he came.
He says a few words to me, the
only words exchanged on our long journey:
I used to live in the city, he says. It nearly
drove me mad. I moved to the country.
I cultivated a garden. I installed a wood stove.
This was healthy.

III.

A small delight, to watch the shadow
command the oar, the grace in it.
I think of a woman's dress. I think
of the word rustle. I feel the word rustle.
My left hand points to the shoreline.
Spanish moss hangs from a bald cypress.
I say the word, Fire, and the Spanish moss becomes
engulfed. I say, Stop, and everything
stops, even the sun. Its position makes
me think the phrase six o'clock. While
Esmeralda, the city entire, is locked
in my rule, I step out onto the water.
I find I can walk across it. I know the
city's name, but I'm not sure I ever lived
here. The blades of grass feel foreign
on the soles of my feet.

IV.

Four has always been my favorite number,
I think. A lightning bug emits a flash of green.
It is the only creature unstuck and I follow it.
It leads me through a snow covered valley,
through a yellowed wheat field, through
a suspended dust storm. I brush away the particles
and they drop to the cracked earth.
I'm in a desert now. A woman sits with her legs
crossed. I sit with her. I feel the urge to tell her
a joke. It's apparent. She feels the same urge.
We both try to get the words out, but we keep
laughing, our minds rushing to the punchline.
Before we finish our jokes, we die. We decompose.
We turn to skeletons, our bony mouths full of ash.
We're born again, our joy and humor now with a depth centuries old.
We laugh, death much easier than we'd expected.
We try to tell the jokes again. The cycle beings and ends and begins.
The lightning bug insists that we move on.

I'm led to a gate. Guarding the gate is a girl
with a red ribbon in her yellow hair.
I ask if I can call her maiden.

I can almost see through the girl.
Rolling hills and a crystal stream
serve as her backdrop just beyond
the gate. She summons me with
a gentle wave of her hand.
I lean down. She kisses me.

You're my first kiss, she says.

I hope I'm not your last.

She takes my hand and insists we walk backwards.
The ground is uneven, my feet unsure.

There's an old saying I'm sure you know, she says.
The definition of madness is doing the same thing
and expecting a different result. This applies to more
than recurring bad decisions. It applies to death.

What are you saying? I've been expecting a different death?

You've been expecting a different consequence of death,
but you keep dying the same way, the girl says. Watch me.
Be curious. But say no more. Don't diffuse death of its
wild alchemy.

We walk backwards through the gate.
I want a secret, something
the girl doesn't know about me, one
dark moment to add dimension. But
the thought lurks that she knows
more about me than me. Time speeds
up. Day turns to night. Snow feathers
down. Backwards we walk into empty
homes, into dry riverbeds, into the unknown.
We begin to fall. From what, I'm not sure.
To where, I'm not sure.
The girl grips my hand tightly.

When will I know that I've died?

Shhh, she says. No words. Only wonder.

I find myself in a coverless Italian summer.
Grass browned. Skin freckled.
I find myself impatient,
no longer willing to entertain
the destinies of the salt and sea.
I edit video of you in a cobbled basement.
There's a knowing look that lasts four seconds.
I split it into six fragments and set it in reverse,
an unknowing, a deletion.
The crook of your neck
and shoulder blade. The red of your hair.
Some nights I hang from the rails. Five minutes.
Ten. And pull myself up.
Tented and mad by August,
stabbing ice with a little
black cocktail straw.
How can I change my
How can I love my
How can I erase my
body?
The rains wet me.
The wind wrings me.
This city we used to walk
under streetlights.
Now I bike through,
pedaling, furious and blind,
toward a place I don't know until
I arrive, and I kiss a young woman
who looks a lot like me. I ask her
to say my name over and over.
I want to fully occupy the moment,
the space, this time. Her lips
remain closed and her
hands linger on my shoulders
and no music plays and
there are voices, loud and
happy, speaking a language
that's completely new.

There was a time—and this wasn't all that long ago—where I wanted to be seen, loved, admonished. I wanted to be some novelist casanova, women, movie deals, et cetera. And one day it changed. I wish there was some monumental event tied to it, some clear catalyst, but to be honest this opposite idea, this idea of erasure, came to me in a supermarket. In the checkout line the cashier didn't greet me, didn't ask the usual did-you-find-everything type questions. The transaction was wholly procedural, nothing human to it. The total showed up on a screen. I swiped a card.

And it reminded me of that part in DeLillo's—I know, it's always DeLillo—in his book Zero K where he talks about the origin of "alone," and what the word really connotes. The word is a rather simple portmanteau of the Middle English phrase "all one." And when you think of the word like this, all one, it gives you a different idea. It does for me anyway. All one suggests freedom from any tie or association. It's who you are minus geography, minus desire, minus friends, minus family, minus lovers. Many people would say there is no self if you were to eliminate essentially the entire context of your life, but I disagree.

I say all of this to say, I'm hitting the red button. I'm eliminating all my friendships to regain a semblance of an inner life. I think they've become responsible for a projected version of myself, an expected version rife with inconsistencies that I wish to no longer adhere to. I know what you're thinking. I'm going to be some half-assed buddhist of the plains, but this small world I've played a small part in shaping has become suffocating, and the only way for me to exist in this space is as a vapor.

It was strange and didn't register as a serious request. She wanted to take care of me. Nothing ******. Just a meal here and there, maybe a little tidying up of the house.

She wanted me to talk. And that part, the talking, always felt transactional, a repayment of her cleaning and cooking. She didn't ask questions. Just nudged me on with emphatic nods in the living room, sitting six feet away from me in a stray office chair. She listened as if I were recounting a past life of her own.

I told her once I loved her little feet, especially in those heels. The next week she wore sneakers. She was older but not old, fifty or so. Two children a few years younger than myself.

She made a point of not staying past ten or drinking more than a single glass of wine.

I was always a little embarrassed by the state of the house. The ***** clothes strewn across the room indistinguishable from the clean. Earmarked novels, long novels, the kind you could bludgeon a person to death with, gathered dust on the coffee table, the desk, the kitchen counter. She touched them, fascinated by what secrets or sage advice might lay within, but she never read a page.

One night I realized I'd never said her name out loud. And she said, "That's impossible. Of course you have." But neither of us could think of a particular moment. And just when I was about to, she said, "Why break the streak?"

We grew more comfortable with one another. She wore less makeup and let her age show. She'd show up in sweatpants. Some nights we'd order Chinese and play that familiar game where every fortune is punctuated with "in bed." A stranger will change your life forever tomorrow in bed. Lies lead to great calamities in bed. So on.

We called them dates, our lunches in the break room, taken each day around 2 p.m. She would bring me leftovers from the night before, always making a point of saying something like, "My husband just couldn't finish it."

She brought baked ziti on a Wednesday last March. I told her it was the best I'd ever eaten as I forked it out of the tupperware container, the edges still hot from the microwave. She said she hadn't been intimate in two years.

"Is that possible?"

"It is."

*** didn't transpire immediately. We worked up to it.

I liked the way she directed me. I'd never experienced anything quite like it. She'd tell me to touch myself while she held me in her arms, she'd snag a handful of my hair, she'd dig her nails into my thigh, but her words were always beautiful, whispered, tender, spoken in the sacred and profane language of lovers.

I'd come and she'd make a comment about the quantity, comparing it to her husband's.

In the serene afterglow before we toweled ourselves off, I'd rest my head against her breast, and I'd say, "I could stay here forever."

"Every man I've ever slept with has said that."

"How many men have you slept with?"

"Has anyone ever liked the answer to that question?"

"I don't mind. We could compare data."

"Including you?"

"Including me."

"Two."

She crawled out of the bed and turned on some music, Neil Young, "A Man Needs a Maid."

"I always felt guilty for liking this song," I said.

"Me too," she said.

We drank coffee on the back porch before the sun came up. "There was a man," she said, "before I married. He was an artist, a painter. We were in college and I loved the deliberate way he spoke. He'd think, sometimes for a full minute, before he said anything. There was a softness in his voice that required you to pay closer attention to him. Your voice is not all that different."

The Department of Transportation began tearing down the houses in my neighborhood to make room for an additional two lanes of traffic. By October mine was the only house left on the block. The apocalypse in miniature. We'd drive by piles of brick and fencing and she'd begin to cry.

It was a particularly brutal winter, and she buried her car in mud and snow when she tried to back out of the yard on the day of her son's graduation. I offered to drive her.

"No, no, no no no."

We sat in the snow, our backs against her car. She leaned in and said, "Your cologne is new."

"Yes."

"You've cut your hair."

"Yes."

"Your shirt, it's actually ironed."

Silence for a beat.

"Who is she?"