Your Face Will Surely Show It.

I don't like to cry in the light because I don't like to see the splashes because I don't need reminding because I already know what the old man in wal-mart must have known when he asked me if I was okay. And I almost didn't say yes. But we know how to compromise and drink 1% milkfat and this is that gee-whiz time-suck and I have other things that demand my attention, like the switch function and careerbuilder.com and tiger balm and babies and children and blank walls and old hairline fractures that just won't heal and funerals I won't be attending and how I don't be cool by fanning myself with money. Staying busy keeps the deus in the machina. So I try to stay busy. And when I say that I feel like I... like I... I just sound like I feel sorry for myself, so I don't. So I just go back to the things he has written, to remind myself. Because I need reminding. And it all started in 7th grade, my relentless quest for unequivocal evidence, when a boyfriend wrote me the most earnest, romantic, contrived letter telling me how I was the sun in his sky and I had read maybe a paragraph when Ms. Genette, my French teacher, picked it up and threatened to make me read it aloud but before I could speak he spoke, to the class, "I don't care if you read it aloud because I mean it. I mean it." But he broke up with me a few months later, the only boy that ever did, for some girl he met at church and what is stopping you from just walking out right now? Our social contract? Because you are always quick to remind me that it offers only symbolic security. I trust a spit handshake more.

If I ever die in a terrible motorcycle accident, I will always wonder: Did I say that I love you? Did I say that I want to? And you will always wonder: Should I have looked at porn less and fucked my wife more? And then you will remember about the baby and about the schedules and about how your wife looked and you will know you did the right thing and can live with no regrets. And then I will remember how I could never die in a motorcycle accident because I will never ride a motorcycle or take LSD and I will also live with no regrets.

Major Tom to ground control: there is no hero in your sky.

My Lovey Post To Myself

Finish a paper, finish a crossword, finish a sentence. Something about cramps, something about paints, something about cancer. Work schedules, social calendars, custody arrangements, rashes. Television, radio, mp3 playa. I am not usually this much fun. And I am not young anymore.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how to be(come) indelible. To be the water mark. To set that fuckin' bar. So that when he thinks of another woman, he cannot help but to compare her to me, and that I always be the best. A tattoo, even one of my forgettable name or my regrettable face, is ambiguous. Many girls could give him a baby. Lots of people love other people that get cancer. Several girls are smart. Plenty are kind. I don't know how to be more appealing than strangers having sex. I don't know enough words or stories to be more interesting than television. I am severe but I am not radical. I want to be colorfast but all I do is bleed. I want you to take my remains and smoke them.

Women Who Believe They Deserve More Because They Are Special

There is this lady who always tells me stories about her friend.
She tells me about her over beers.
Over the phone.
In emails.
And how her friend's just had such a hard life.
Just been so especially hard on her.
So hard, I really could not have any idea how hard.
Because I have never known personal tragedy.
But this poor chickadee.
So much troubles.
So much worse than most other people's troubles.
Than almost everyone else's troubles.
One bad thing after another.
Poor thing.
Bless her heart.
Poor little lamb.
Poor little depressed lamb.
How does she even keep going with an outlook so bleak?
With odds so bad?
I felt empathetic.
No wait, sympathetic.
No, no.
Not sympathetic, either.
What is it when you are
Neither empathetic nor sympathetic?
I suppose I don't give much of a fuck at all.

Only/Over

Here I am, going cross-eyed again, beats star-crossed or lazy-eyed so I can't complain, and how do you do? What it is that you do. What is it that you do? I'm caught in a loop with you, and. So I'll just be over here, writing the same things over again writing things only for you that only go over your head. But when he's not watching, he reads; between the lines. In the spaces? And in the punctuation? In the carriage returns and the damnable linefeeds? In that infinitesimal space between lips and in the breath between subatomic particles? I've had that place on my mind for about a thousand years, all imbued with foreign new color and familiar new smells, with flush love coming off of us like heat. But I'm glad for this other place, too, our gentle complacency. If you said you like me better than your past or fantasy girls, I wouldn't believe you, and if you gave me a diamond, I'd only use it to sharpen my teeth. But that is because I love reliability so much that I want to eat it up with a spoon. And you need sharp teeth to eat reliability.

nothing really rocks
nothing really rolls
and everyone
you know
some day
will die

But you will die with a tattoo of a flag with my M in it and it will end up being a bit of a buzzkill for your next wife.

• Unless her name also starts with an M.

• Then she will probably think its fate or karma.

• And you two will be so well-suited because you, too, are a fatalist.

• And you believe in karma.

• Because you have a bad case of Catholic guilt.

• That you got from that evangelical protestant upbranging.

• But she will never love you the way I do, my man-child son-husband.