1. I am less a person than a calling to a person. The origin of that calling is a mystery to me. It appears, brooming consciousness from something that was starrier and brighter, that lived basilisk eyes all night. It’s like the daisies just past the truck stop drifting downtown. I have begun to buy it things. My body when asleep. So far, none of the gifts has been accepted by this paralytic dreamboat. But soon. Soon…
  2. The man who stapled a crow to his body does not bother me. The man who stapled a crow to his body no longer bothers me. It is strange to me that he fills stadiums with people by doing just that, stapling a crow to his body. The crowds gather by the thousands to watch it peck him torturously. They talk about the stapler in reverential whispers. When he leaves, he tells them he loves them and is woozy. He wanders off, losing blood, smiling.
  3. Salt. I send you salt for our anniversary! You don’t realize we are even married. But this salt arrives at your front door in a box, in elaborate mythology. You go to the front door of your house and find the box. When you open it and find salt has been worked into a museum-quality piece of statuary, you run to show your wife, and she immediately bursts into flames. She bursts into flames under the baleful eyes of social media.
  4. We agree to meet in the pages of a children’s book. The book was authored in the 1940s, so our human safety and dangers are all garbled. A cartoon animal shelters us in the city and feeds us. We learns she is part of the Cartoon Resistance and she wants us to join, to become blood siblings in her secret kitchen. We do it sheepishly, cut ourselves and bleed into each other’s bodies, feeling like eight-year-olds. Someone mentions the surgeon general, someone the Pope and someone Wallace Stevens. Later, we both comment how sickly she looked. How sick her blood must be.
  5. You die and go into a cistern. Everybody knows where the cistern is but me. You repeatedly send me messages scolding me for not visiting you. But you never tell me your “death address”. I see after a while that you are starting to enjoy this. Like so many dead game-players, you are using death as gift wrap for poison gifts. You are deathwashing everything you have ever said. You can barely keep from laughing anytime you say anything anymore. It is like a disease. You run into the ocean to hide your laughter, drowning all over again.
  6. The Golden Fleece was only rented. The creature from which it had been skinned to make it came back for it with an army of lawyers. The dragons fought on a battlefield, on what was thought to be the side of justice, to retain the fleece, but later we learned: it was all just corporate interests. We had jumped rope for the bastards for years. The dragons themselves were told to retain lawyers, but they dashed themselves on rocks below the cliffs. They saved a little face.
  7. I crawl into a hole. This suddenly feels like an elegant, 21st century solution. I am afraid to share this with anyone. It will just get all twisted.
  8. I is a mother. I is a bother. I is a dither. I is blather. I is bluster. I is a rooster each morning. I is I because my little eye knows me. I is a real pain in the pronoun. I is a conifer. I is a wicket. I is a sorry lube for what you are about to say. Do it dry.
  9. Tasting the eyes of stones. All night last night, all long night, all long last night. We were. Kissing the borscht of dragon blood. I felt the need to follow up with after you had died. Only then would the real breakthrough be possible. You would show me I’m a tympanum. I would make you vibrate like The Sun. The new technology tastes blood.
  10. I can’t follow you home, follow you home. I can’t follow the shadow into the sleeve, the sleeve into the hole. Nothing beads the windowsill as you promised would occur. I open the window all night long. Off and on. The binaries of being rain and dry, sorrowful and here. The river barks several times under its ancient long moonlight of gossip. We go and look down into darkness to see the first time our words, overlaid, were like the souls of birds dying in the same instant. The same apocalypse become kindergarten.
  11. This was and is the fairy tale. You erase it to get to all the white candy of the empty page. I am beside you brushing the tarry snow of our taffy conversations away. Eventually, we must reach bone. The explanation of number is more number. The fairy tale begins to hum to sell itself. It has nobody but itself and the chandelier left after the grand hotel disappears. Still floating there. The welcome is not welcome so becomes powerful.
  12. Pocketfuls of things for you. It’s all that is left. Insects, gluten art, toroidal glitter space that occur in cinema as it drowns. I drown before you in the color red, never red, once red, almost red, red that follows you home then turns the corner, seeking a circle like you that is not you. Never your sweet mind. Your first phone number you never told me. I am trying to call that place where you were and are not tonight, all night.