XLV. Bed-Time Epistle

To my blanket beside me,
*******I don't mean to lead you on
*******by sitting you afresh upon my sheets
*******every morning, like your services will be called upon that night.

*******But I'm supposed to be an adult now,
*******and while I give little enough account for my own maturity,
*******I have heard that it's the little things that make a difference.
*******And making my bed is a really little thing.

*******I know this will be hard for you to understand,
*******Not least because you're a blanket, and therefore
******(Friends are honest with each other)
*******Ill-equipped for understanding,
*******But also because
******(You might say, if you could or cared)
**************The drop from the bed to the floor
*********************is a little thing, which
****************************Makes a difference.

*******"And there is, it seems, a certain malice
**************in your predictable caprice--
*******Set me up, just to knock me down,"
******(You'd quip, if you weren't merely a blanket,
**************And you felt angry with me.)

*******But to be completely fair,
*******The mercury's too high for you,
*******Too humid, hot apocalyptic,
**************Like leather-wrapped sauna pews
*******And this really isn't your shining hour.

*******I'm not breaking up with you, or keeping you on the hook
*******I'm just waiting for the earth to turn
**************For the leaves on the trees to catch fire
**************And burn the Summer heat away

**************For the sun to settle down
**************for the air to thicken up

*******I'll call you when I need you, at year's end
*******Because
******(As you'd appreciate, if you weren't just a blanket)
*******You're everything I need in an ill-weather friend.

P.s. When you writhe against me,
Like a downy white worm,
I get a little creeped out.

A Very Short Story (Will Likely Be Deleted Quickly)

She'd grown so tired of the world and its wind, so weary and drawn taut along her seams, where her soul met her body, that she retreated finally into her room, where her table legs banged at opposite corners from the fierce wind that raced around and around but sometimes snuck in, turned the table, then grew melancholy silent still and stale. The room, in all its familiarity, would be her world surrogate. It was manageable and quantifiable, and all the dust was hers and her. Hidden away with her books, and her table, and her dust that was her and all the memories of all lost things whose absence hollowed out the world, she began, in earnest, to decipher herself.

Her impulses took shape, her thoughts were gradually given structure, syntax, and all her emotions revealed, finally, their bleak grammar to she who should have known it best. And so accustomed, as she was, to spreading herself out in the most unexpurgated way, she began to draft herself upon the walls that were her horizon. Every day, her charcoal hands would make more erratic marks on the surface, strange little figures, tracing out the lyrical contours of her very soul. Each mark upon every wall was another secret part of herself, given dimension (two of them, in fact), and with each outpouring of herself, her soul stretched out a fraction more from the nucleus, the core, until each glyph began its slow constriction back, drawing with it the walls,. The contours of her life had been forced into a strange and foreign geometry by her methodical self-exegesis, and were slowly righting themselves. Every wall fell inward, in and in, drawn in by the elastic tethers of her personal gravity, hawsing the walls toward their source, and the wind grew smaller and louder. All the parts of herself, which she'd written out, carried the walls, hewing now to a greater command than nails or function.

When they found the room, a well-defined negative space, it was caution taped off, but nobody could say how much tape they used, and it was photographed, and it was described as a very queer thing, and then it was left to be. Nobody ever entered the room, how could they, nor could they quite describe the shape of her perfect singularity.

XLIV. A Simple, Fucking Text Field

"But, I want to impress you."
"You don't have to impress me; just tell me a story."
"I want you to think… I want you to be impressed—"
"I will be. Just tell me a story."
"And I want it to be original. I need that."
"When did you get like this?"

"I've always been like this—I'm just now introducing myself."
"Just tell me a story…"

XLIII. To Anna, In Winter.

What I saw in a stone
Was a thick rime, too much the same.
Was the cold start of February;
The cold beginnings of the second month;
The first year of the second decade; the third millenium.
A second take of the promise of a new year.
A double-take glance with second thoughts,
But a hanging smile left suspended
When the face fell.

XLII. Role Call

...
You were the first cusp of failure caught and held like a cloud above the sheets.
You were my first How can this not be love?
You were my first disappointed, sympathetic look.
You were my first conditional unconditional drawn taut against a moral plank and snapped to leave a mark upon the great divide that never fell.
You were my first regret. The gateway regret that let in all the regrets that followed.
You were my first intimidation.
You were my first "Let me inspire you" and why do only you get to see above us both?
You were my first terrifying phone call that I would take again tonight and every night for the rest of my life, in bed or Brooklyn or Buckhead.
You were my first apathy. My first nonplussed, unremarkable, even, and I felt it and it shook me and I stared.
You were my first kiss and the first one I'd take back if I could and you grabbed greedily for both all at once.
You were my first broken heart.
You were my first hand-held quivering voice, I promise I can get this out, just wait.
You were the first broken heart I noticed that wasn't mine.
You were my first phone call with my first cell, and you were so many other firsts, that I lost count the only time I ever counted.
You were the first unequivocal mistake I made more than twice.
You were my first friend for life for three or four years.
...

XXXVIII. Riddled With Holes

...
Where's the excited bluster
Of a dangling conversationalist
Who is only alive half the time.
Whom imagination forswore at birth,
(An uninspiring turning point.)
***Who wrote that thing about you that one time
******Who made that thing that looks like anything but you.
***More like him, in fact.

"If anybody could do it***you could."
A thriving indiscretion that has failed—
Normans storming and the Hasty drawbridge failing sort of failure
—to be born out by the evidence.

Where's the follow-through
Of a half-turned lightbulb,
Who told you from the start
Not to pin your hopes on him?
***(Lay them gently,***if you must.)
Who's not responsible
For lost or stolen items.

XLI. Under Sky So Starless

The nap of the blanket rubs against his nose.
****Shit, shit, shit
Instigating, provoking, antagonizing, evoking a sneeze that he stifles quietly
In the gulf between their pillows.
Everything in this room is so goddamned hostile,
Drawing him to open warfare
With this foreign domesticity.
Not a deliberate war,
Or one he'd chosen for himself,
****An emergent property of the wretched necessity
****Of everything that came before.

The dull, incessant
****Scratch, scratch, scratch
Of shifting sheets,
The call-to-arms creak of brass bed-posts,
And the deep yawn of stretching walls.

Please, God,
Keep it down. Please,
God, don't let her wake up.
I'm not ready**** to let go of her hand.