the death and funeral pyre of

I.

the death and funeral pyre of your wife and boy WE ARE FINE wife the static and dead air of the television BE CALM wife, crouched in the basement, skin alive with “near misses” a nightmare of cold blue concrete floor BE CALM you are my son and you are my wife WE ARE FINE WE ARE who may yet live, their strange hearts, who may have been BE CALM WE ARE FINE BE CALM BE CALM are fine, my wife, be calm, our strange hearts, the death of our cold wife and boy BE CALM my heart, my wife, my nightmare of blue concrete we are crouched, we are alive, we are in the basement skin alive, you are my son and BE CALM you are my wife, firm and large in the ways he once knew in the mother “Please I want to see” WE ARE FINE “Please I want to BE CALM BE my wife, the mother, the death of our strange hearts, firm in the ways he once WE ARE we are fine, we are calm, our hearts static and cold, concrete BE now pulling and unraveling and unsnapping until these, pink and erect and what he so long BE CALM WE ARE FINE BE scurried, exposed, free and how, lips, hands, out of consciousness WE ARE FINE pale pale pale pale WE ARE FINE BE CALM WE ARE within the walls, ghosts, voices “Please I FINE WE ARE CALM WE ARE concrete ghosts, these voices we so long FINE BE CALM WE ARE FINE WE ARE FINE WE ARE CALM you are my son and you BE CALM BE CALM are my wife, pale pale pale and fraught, so long free, so long these voices, firm in ways he once FINE knew once alive, we are calm, WE ARE CALM, we are calm and we are calm, we are pale pale pale and we, we, we, BE CALM WE ARE FINE BE CALM WE ARE FINE BE CALM WE ARE FINE BE CALM WE ARE WE ARE WE ARE WE ARE WE WE WE WE WE WE WE WE WE WE WE WE WE WE WE WE WE WE WE WE WE WE WE WE WE

II.

Be calm.
We are fine.
Be calm.

James:

You dream your skin gone. Do not worry over it. Most artists worth your time were not exemplary people.

Your skin would hold the pain that you didn’t have strength for.

It’s always easier to blame the other person isn’t it? Failure is an intimate process.

An experienced writer can quickly observe your tricks, their effect, aimless, competitive, petty. There is of course no accounting for taste. Fighting for control with asides and personal reminiscences, snickering… this imposter only verifies what I’ve felt. There’s a flatness. One incident of people being bad or getting punished after another. But empty. I hardly remember. We both knew I didn’t have plans, I never had plans.

Your voice, echoing inside your cavernous skull. Even with eyes we get too isolated.

Different subjects infect your mind.

I am on the outside watching all of this. I am Robert. I am now x years old. Something happened and here I am.

you must learn to appreciate Robert for what he is, a blind man who is more than the sun

Hunched over and pulled off a strip of white birch bark like onion skin because he laughed, apologized. Silence of skin on skin. I’d had opportunities, she said, that J. had never had because he had dedicated himself to the farm. And then I always take my first two fingers right to the skin, damp, the soap film still there, and then them down along the side of my leg, down to the bubbles, and down then further. Because you think someone might get a little drunk. In the washroom and soon my skin was rife with gooseflesh. Maybe he thought because he’d died once he was exempt from any real fear. Only J. could do anything for himself and sure enough he came stumbling out of the smoke with his pants half smoldering and his skin burned away. Gone into the cloud or was that smoke, gathered and gray.

Because my food is gone and starving cats yowl from my stoop. Because we have seen it, he will wake chained to the bed-frame. You dream your skin gone to ash—

J. exonerated for his crimes, no mention of guilt, of horror, of night-sweats for our “hero.” No mention of the heat of my skin, of the sun, of my lips upon his chest. Now the tightness of your breath as we stretched over each other, gutless skins, empty bodies, spread further, devouring, what is it you clasped? Under shifting outlines of bodies, under ticker tape, under stolen names, “on the run,” “hidden in the most absurd and childish places,” “sorcerer.”

Because it is death to live otherwise. By ‘against the law’ I mean this boy and the cool damp of their soul. Now in those days a city, a burst of light. Now a woman vibrated into her own shadow. Now no women the way he dreamed, cold lips against his neck. He woke and crawled to me from within, he, what a lit match does to canvas.

I’d told J. in the same words. Thrown to the ground, palms bloody. There was only that heat: you are dying, you begin to scream. J. knows nothing but strange fictions. Eat nothing, curl into a worm, kick if you like, drown, figureless and beneath. Scoundrels, I will shoot them in the face. Here they will make soap of you, here you are just as quickly a man with a shovel as a gull or dog, and only smoke is returned. For now legs arms nipples tongues pink painted toe nails giggles and smiles, for now dozing, shouts and moans, for now musk ducts and long teeth. J. quickened with blood and limbs. Men call out “buddy.” Men call you “buddy.” You don’t have to explain anything to me.

“two boxes of pages I assumed were his new novel and the various film scripts he stooped to work on”

Every day scientists are making new miracles happen. I like the flashes out of time—the idea of them more than the actual demented realism.

One of the big problems has always been getting the alien to do something or mean something. We run into him and drive away and then run into him again.

Several times you say ‘we’ instead of ‘they.’ I guess you are slipping into remembering, a wonderful scattered sensation like air.

Should someone have died?

If I was afraid I didn’t know it.

I sometimes distrust a person who goes out of their way to let you know they appreciate your pain. It’s realistic but it isn’t hungry, if that makes sense. Imagine getting this far only to die of malnutrition.

Strange animals, massive when Pedro suddenly shows up, awkward with everyone. As if hypnotized by a circus fortune teller the ones that make you do things that you wouldn’t normally do.

I like the impact/horror of being kept locked up for eternity with the self. Everything in one voice.

Where there would have been a ceiling was a desire.

Where there would have been a desire was intoxicating.

stories of his dreams, a larger than usual

This new man, the phony I, coming to Robert saying, “Listen here we been talking, her and me, and we’ve been thinking maybe it’s worth considering—now don’t take it the wrong way—but I was thinking of our potential, how we can work wonders.” He tells stories of his dreams, this phony Robert, this new me, of larger than usual ambition, of the unspeakable. His dreams: shirtless aged father’s gnarled nipples and hairs white, horror and confusion, stripped to undershorts and shivering, spindly arms. Of course in these visions Robert cracked the asshole good and then gave a boot to the eyes (the man, the phony me, no clear face but expression of hurt and fear and eyes express this fear in the way all eyes open like a trout soul shouted with absolute terror). Maybe kill the son of a bitch then, brown blood-stained towel round Robert’s neck, breathing old air. The gravestones. By evening too drunk to walk. Thinking, There are too many memories here. Soon we’ll fit into the skin of better men.

I (almost) wish I had a young child or two so I could put this knowledge to good use

Christmas miracles in neat red ink. The route by which you imagine the murderers escaped, shackled to the idea of wife and child, home. Some peculiar sensation lighting up inside me like dozens of little Christmas bulbs. Recall: a “rather attractive brunette” hauling “enormous suitcases” up the winding stairs. Later found under the floor boards in the basement, alone, fat with kid, gasping and eyes. Six hundred in cash split between us. Christmas in the background, the head lights through the snowfall like moon beams. I lay there engulfed, listening to Bing Crosby dream of a dam split and devastation. A crowd formed around me. I’d been reduced to infant size by the city. Wreathes coiled with green and red lights from every street lamp and phone pole, lighted garlands across the street at the end of every block, dipping under the weight of our new small love. White Christmas and other animals. Businessmen with arms full of secret packages. A code. The lights making me think of Ma and Dad and how we used to drive around the rich neighborhoods on Christmas night, to admire.

Recognition of the forces that make us different is a clear step towards experience

Yes, we were both mostly happy and in love except that her personality may have been suited to a lifestyle of animal butchery. An island. Before your people. She came in, her face red from exertion, all the intelligence and misery of the human balanced within her skin. Would you like a glass of water? No reason to speak, each understand simply without thought the quickening of the other’s breath. We will examine these lives, the highest splendor…they disappear, they always disappear. There is no reason to speak even if awe and fear did this, shrouded in curtains. We learned to not breathe heavily. We learned the slightest flinch—we

The girl clearly states what she is not.

When the wolves were gone she switched to mother and wife.

The Good Young Man

I.

Charlie laughed.

Pete: Watch it Charlie—

Charlie: —women?

Pete: Charlie…

Charlie (his eyes black): Shhh.

Voices: “Charlie?” “Charlie?” “Charlie?”

Boy it was cold.

Pete: Probably, man.

Charlie: Never you mind woman.

II.

Imagine if a man don’t do what God says. Certainly his hand never shook and his eyes never teared.

Pete: What man?

Never. I’m a little boy. Eyes. White.

Washed his hands without the hand soap. The old man put a hand on Peterson’s neck. Charlie’s eyes shifted to Clarence. The old man half turned away and whistled.

Old Man: An honest man owes money to no man, Pete. You got your mother’s eyes.

Hands on hips. The old man spat and again.

The Dead Man: You boys mind if I sit with you?

Linda: You’re an old woman, Nick. Please Nick. Old! Never mind. Nick! Slow night? Charlie! Charlie!

The old woman nodded.

The Dead Man: —You’re an old woman, Nick.

Linda: Please Nick. Old! Never mind, Nick. Slow night. Charlie!

Charlie: The old woman nodded.

III.

The boy steps back. This boy who needs help? The boy speaks up.

Boy: We’re— (The boy pauses. Eyes lined the walls—)

Pete: Ah my boy! My boy. Dead…

Old Man: Sailor boys huh?

Pete kissed the boy’s forehead. Pete rested his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

IV.

The old man wore his Bin Laden mask. Jarry stood before the old man and the old man laughed. Faces lighted by fire.

Old Man: Your little boy! Preferable to dead boys or dead dogs. —The old general… The old general—Oh if only, if only, he must have thought. “Dead?”

Pete: A boy Orson—he’s—

Father laughed. The man’s face was a grayed smudged. Soon, almost a man.

V.

How the boy watched the mother in the lighted windows. Who are you, little boy?

Boy: You old idiot.

The boy nodded and held the man’s hand, faint and moist. How the boy cooed and stroked the man.

Boy: Oh Father!

Then Father returned. Poor Mother.

Father: Don’t.

Then Father spoke.

Father: All right, all right.

Boy (my eyes on his face): Wife! Father!

Father: Hardly, young man. (His hand shook, however.)

Boy: Never.

Father (as sophisticated men): Boy.

VI.

“Wife? I thought. “Charlie?”

Charlie: The man cried.

Women: Charlie?

Charlie (smiled): Mr. Jack big man.

Young Man: Yes, I. Your father’s older. Pete?

Pete: Even if he did. Old, old man, I saved American boys and I shot gooks.

Young Man: Pete—

Pete: I’m gone, man. A big man.

Young Man: Pete?

Our hands entwined. Pete… If only mother knew!

Mother? Old cow.

The old man brought me home a birdcage. The old man might hear, after all.

Nick: Nick. Nick cried. Nick opened his eyes. Nick nodded. Nick nodded. Nick?

We shook hands. Black. Charlie shook my hand. Falling face-down. White-faced, sweating.

Nick: Pull yourself together.

Recall apparitions doomed to watch you at play.

Recollect the end, the past, in fits of anxiety. Discuss Robert in a relationship with his unnatural and devious lusts. Oppress the ghost and ash of the first wife, the first child.

Stagger through what’s at stake: tender accusations of infidelity, inversion, the smell of dead fish, raw nerves. Factor in their/our constant quarrels, the punching and cussing and biting: “dreadfully abused”; “nearly took the ear off.” Recollect certain scenes between the girlfriend/wife/whatever and the moment he/“he” disappeared.

Explain “Animal Lover.” Explain “Anne Frank.” Explain a little more about trying to figure out why. Explain how dialogue is the skin of a large dangerous animal, a white pink thing, trembling and mewing. Explain how tension is a disease.

A toughness born of obstinance. Coddled skin is easily abused.

Crimes of passion are common on these brutal outskirts and powerful enough to crush bone.

what am I known for

What am I known for, do I have an allegiance to a particular critical school, am I known for my work on a particular story/author or am I known for other works? Am I worth the rope, his skin, the accident? How could I face my wife and in-laws with any story? No more to the face: everything cut and busted up too easy, the eyes with the lip and the nose. Certain hack work takes an amount of polish and vision, yes, that ridiculous shout of “             !” and the crack of the flashbulb: I know what you did you lousy b—— and I’m gonna get my life back no matter what. I was angry, frustrated, sometimes belligerent with my writing failures, she was tired from working all day, I took her thin, frail wrist and pulled her toward the frightening stillness of my failure. She’s drunk and a fool and he’s abusive, merciless. Pulling her thinly covered breasts in close to me and then the rest of her figure until we were crying, a fun thing, a happy fucking moment.

"Drunk Girls"

Cheap terror tactics disintegrating the Hulks and the Fantastic Fours, strange alliances snapping off and writhing like snakes when they’re electrocuted. Several thousand miles from France, “the monument of all your stupid smoldering nightmares and collapsing horrors,” the Café Enchante was obliterated by what the papers assumed was a pipe-bomb sewn into an infant. The bakery La Madeleine was exploded by two pipe bombs tossed from a bicycle. Perverts and vandals are caused by a breakdown in the American character, by “love” and “diphtheria.”

the screams of decadents, vague glitches and clicks (beautiful in the night air). —Flickers of electronic language.

into the peaty water, and then I awoke

…an illumination, with a subtle destructive composition.

When referring to _____ or _____ it is important to remember the definition of a hero.

Many recipients of satiric ridicule laugh along with their tormentors and survive the event by being in on the joke.

Our heroes become dust and our fathers long to be dust.

On the other hand, a target who is without any sense of humor or sense of their own pompousness is going to get the wind knocked out of them; which is totally the point.

The illumination of a person's windbag hypocrisy via satire is the whole purpose of the venture.

              …children laughed together without suspecting they were being watched, children with wide scared eyes and then on a baby sleeping in its mother’s arms, children should go someone said, children whispered to each other & children we lay rigid in our beds, sheets pulled taut to our chins, staring upward at our glow in the dark constellation, mentally gauging the strength, the solidity, of the earth far below, children be serious, children frankly quite bad, children you know nobody nowhere is entirely quite safe ha ha children take heart!, children grinning, circling gulls, children as we imagined them, children wept for burst eardrums & children will watch faces curled like roses, children trained by those hallowed methods long preferred by the old man, methods long a secret, now free to all: “Use the method judiciously, children, bust open the New World and impregnate mountains,” children long ago grown and died, the dens where the jackets and the leather bound volumes and pipes of fathers lay, children and news stations, the death and funeral pyre of your wife and boy, the narrow escape into the winter cold by your wife and boy… children devoured, smoldering on the news, children from forty yards off—their backs steamed before their hair burst to flames!, children will soon fade to nothing, children stalking along our floorboards, lingering as shadows outside our windows, when we wake screaming, children washed along the beach, small as birds, children but especially shrunken men, ah, children’s names— children’s rooms, in their closets, on their beds, children, your children, taller houses, children gone: children who fled up the ladders, now visited these museums and prayed to the bodies of these…

Everything I Have Ever Written about Alligators, Clowns, Redacted

I’ve grown concerned about the alligator problem. The skins and skulls of alligators, a billion years old, swishing and growling and hissing. Always a funeral: men, banished, born into the full articulation of crimes, the only monster older than briefcases and the nests of birds. You understand—he dreamed grey dust, open mouths, black lives allowed to shape us. How those men rode along obliterated streets. Screams spread along the walls of a crimson house, the father, the ghost, the last sounds of your old world. The death of your crops and your dead fathers. Their mouths, grown wild, may fend for themselves, most of the time, teeth, mist and blood staring and screaming into the mouth of day. Glenn Miller, as if made of lead, as if our “eternal boy,” digging holes as deep as bodies. Children in your walls, under your porch, wedged into your doghouse, crawling up your chimney, sleeping on your wife, smearing her lipstick, stuck and hanging under the floorboards and in the basement, covered in fat gnats and leaches, flailing in stagnant pools, hissing nonsense, hissing backwards. On your recliner we found the father and mother, eating maps and cameras, leaving the remains, the skulls, the faded angels. The lost father peering from from dank places; the mother, fat on birds, feathers, tongues and bones. When you were a boy you woke to fire, moans, and ash. You knew nothing of how all land emerged from our alligator streets.

Everything I've Ever Written about Alligators, Clowns

“Don’t tell your Mother,” your father said from his lawn chair, “but I’ve grown concerned about the alligator problem.”

A city of flatbed trucks brimming with the skins and skulls of alligators, with the black and green and brown figures of leather and flies.

A given alligator is a billion billion years old.

A given alligator is a billion billion years old.

—alligators swishing and growling and hissing—

Always a funeral with clowns, always a clown show with mutes in white face and polka dots, with men banished beneath the ruffles and the soundless gestures of mimes.

An alligator must murder the membrane it is born into.

By the explosions of oxygen tanks and rye whisky you see, finally, the full articulation of alligators wandering and swaying in the dust and soot, their red mouths.

Everywhere clouds of dust and ash, the walls of what was once the aviary grayed with soot and dust, and where the old general once sat articulating the nature his crimes, now, alone and hissing, the only monster older than he, the green armored alligator.

Flatbed trucks overstuffed with the carcasses of alligators shot through the back of the heads or brimmed with those skins of what were once alligators, now the figments of shoes and boots and briefcases and the homes of rats and the nests of birds.

From the old general’s eyes you understand he knows knives would break against the alligator’s eyes.

He dreamed alligators, gray dust smeared on their green lips—

He forces you to watch the alligators below, their red open mouths, their lazy gliding along the black sewer waters.

How different our lives would have been if we had known the alligators, allowed them to shape us.

How his skin seemed the skin of an alligator and how the kitten alone knew him.

In those days men with skin like blackened alligators rode bicycles along ancient obliterated streets.

Later, your mother and the alligator, the rhythmic squeaking of the mattress, her screams as it consumed her.

My wife wore her hair in curlers and spread the wallpaper along the alligator’s pink flesh walls, while down the river floated the husks of murdered bison and antelope.

Not to think of the man who moves his family into a crimson house—of the father who drifts his family into the mouth of alligators.

Now, the only illume from the yellow eyes of alligators, the ghost wane of gases and thereafter, the last sounds of Pierrots echoed throughout the valleys.

Of your old world, only the alligators survived and after the death of your crops and industries, your sole occupations became the growth and development of alligators.

Soon the dead fathers and their respirators descended by their rope ladders only when they desired your alligators for their parades, their circuses, their amusement parks.

The alligators prodded the meat with sticks, their mouths grown wild.

The birds—if they don’t try to live in the alligator’s mouth—may fend for themselves.

The guy’s a real clown, most of the time.

Then I, without regard for the teeth and humidity, the mist and the blood, the birds clawing and staring and screaming, moved my family into the mouth of alligators.

This alligator digests a buffalo a day.

Through the days, radio blaring dead noise and static, radio flickering into life for a sparkle of Glenn Miller and then sputtering out, as if an alligator were made of lead, as if no possible noise of life were allowed within our eternal creature.

We did not have alligators when I was a boy.

We found alligators digging in the warm soil, digging holes as long as trenches, as deep as their bodies.

We found alligators in your children’s rooms, in their closets, on their beds, shoes laces and ribbons dangling.

We found alligators in your walls, devouring each other and hissing, so much hissing your house seemed a house of steam, of burst pipes.

We found alligators in your yard, under your porch, wedged into your dog house, crawling up your chimney.

We found alligators sleeping on your wife’s side of the bed, on their hind legs and rifling through her underwear, smearing on her lipstick.

We found alligators stuck and hanging out your chimney, wheezing and dying.

We found alligators under the floor boards and in the basement, swimming in the oil furnace, eating the plastic Christmas tree.

We found the alligator asleep in a ditch by your house, covered in fat gnats and leaches.

We found the alligator flailing in stagnant pools, murdering the names of you and your dead brother.

We found the alligator hissing nonsense, hissing backwards.

We found the alligator, fat and yellow, bulged on your father’s recliner.

We found the alligators digging holes in the soft dirt of the cemetery, where your father and mother lay.

We found the alligators eating the maps and cameras and shopping bags the tourists carried.

We found the alligators eating the tourists or murdering the tourists and leaving the remains to putrefy.

We found the alligators under the yellow moonlight, piled and shot through the back of their skulls.

We found the alligators wandering ancient cemeteries, hissing at the chiseled names, the faded angels.

We found the bleached skins of alligators, the skulls of alligators, the lost bodies of our alligators, where your father left them all these years.

We found the stray eyes of alligators peering from apartment windows, from dreams.

We looked for the alligator in dank places.

When found the alligator was eating old portraits of your mother, crunching the frames into splinters, into twisted tin and steel.

When found the alligators rowed past the dead-men, floating in the black pond, fat on peat and lily pads, frogs and guppies.

When found the alligators were fitting birds into their throats, lips bulged and a forest of feathers behind their teeth, soaked and clotted black and red, while from the timeless depths, clucks echoed like barking or screams or mothers wailing.

When found the alligators were swallowing does, digesting does by the nubbins, by the velvet, by the eyes and the black tongues, and from the hollows of a dank valley, fell the whisper of bones.

When you were a boy you woke to the alligator as it swam the black-waters of your floor.

Where once sat the old general with elephant gun, waiting to fire, now moans and hisses the ash covered alligator.

You knew nothing of how all land originated from the body of alligators or that the heavens emerged from the exhalations of alligators.

You should see our alligator streets.

Why we must keep our heads down

That head, she’s symbolic. She’s what the devil watches, stupid with eagerness, his snorts like the purrs of an over-affectionate cat. For two weeks now, I’ve been trying to figure out the transition from media representation to brutes and leg-breakers. Father studies the head, licking pork grease from glistening fingertips. The head is led by a rope from the straw bed to the outdoors, no horror, only a wild-eyed cheer. Wherever the head goes, alarm clocks come unplugged. “The head will see you now, Mr. _____.” I apologized for my tardiness. The shrieks of the head bring hoots and laughter. She [her dead eyes] wanted you to get a real job, not ambition, not lusting after, not tight blue jeans, full movie-star ass. The head, fantasized with erotic clarity: the warmth of the mouth, the firm fullness of those somehow pink lips…

The head living in absolute solitude. The head near catatonic three years now since the death. The head gleams in the sun before it [she] slides easily into devotion or love. I will tell you anyway: that which was once the head, a beautiful apple, the children’s delight—stuck, roasted, blinks back the humiliation. And we wait for some insect to confuse beauty and craftsmanship with something close to love and tenderness.

Robert and the Blind man

Robert is like a lot of people who have always imagined that blind people use youths starving in orphanages to make up for their lack of eyesight. It is not that they could not hear. They can easily discover youths from their sensitive feelings of the environment. At the beginning, Robert pressed tight to the basement walls, silent except for his breathing. Most people cannot imagine being blind, and that they would have the courage to go outside on their own. Or, like this blind man to take the train to somewhere else.

Plastic containers filled with maggots and grubs in sawdust. People have the ability to feel pain to help insure their survival.

In addition, the Blind man has a great opinion of life when he says, “O Father—I cry out to you and yet offer no judgment—I repent what I have done—If you made it so I never killed them—O Father—O Father in heaven—” Rusting fleshless hands of wire feel the skin of the head, trembling and mewing in his hands. There is no doubt that Robert was jealous of how his wife spoke to the Blind man about so many things about her lonely life in her first marriage and how the Blind man touched his wife’s face in a way that he never could. In these situations, an evil will invade some men’s hearts, intolerance will twist some men’s minds. Robert is the person who has a very sensitive mind but just does not know how to show it to other people.

If I Could Convince You to Not Write This Book, Either of Them, I Would

What is my belly for but growing new animals? What is it you clasped, dripping blood? What is said: all dust comes from the skin of infants. What is a man and woman together without new life between them. What is after. What is that? What is. What is it called? What is this I hear about you and our friend? What is and is not the country in that voice of yours! What is at stake. What is he then? What is it? What is it? What is it called again, Daisy’s what?

"a latex mask using [James's] death mask as a model"

You asked me what I was doing. I felt my heart in my throat like a kick. You first noticed how the material world seemed like a ghost, pale, worse than me or anyone. I started to say tremble, but it came out all-different. I shook my head. I shook my head and the world was the threshold of the unknown. Everything acquirable is part of a ghost, neither of us could touch or love or hurt and we’d be better for it. Of course we were scared. We are always scared of the monsters we tried to open.

Film into Writing

James: I am ripped at the seams, I am slowly torn to nothingness. A projector is lit. Vagrants, the only audience, watch, slumped, drunken. So why this desire? What is missing that should be there? Break it to parts—an anachronism, his chivalry, his love of reading fiction.

…writing toward something…Kate’s story, Paul’s story, Miriam’s story, Tommy’s story…x’s story:

“After Tim broke up with him Jason fell into a deep miserable trance. Paul was just sick. Finally, as he always did, Tommy arose from his depression to gorge on food. Gorging always made Donald feel better. Kate returned home to find Robert in a disgusting state. ‘Clean yourself up,’ Miriam said. ‘I’m glad we’re through you pig.’”

What makes it good for you? Into its component parts: what is there that should be accentuated? You made love in the afternoons, slept with a wife, a woman who insisted upon no name but the name you gave her. She pulled away, coughing—the shape of her figure, her pink brassiere, through the lighted window. How she would look strewn. Are you frightened? Do you miss me as I miss you?

You’ve Avoided the Problem Nicely, the Problem Is

She has some sophistication of thought—jealousy and these jealous stirrings, tied up with much discomfort and the pleasure/pain of extraordinary images and details. As I said before I think it’s a really good example of the duality of any passion. Was there a television on? What music was playing? Was it even in an apartment? What was he like? She’s there but the thought process is off somehow: “Next time you make sure she don’t run around on you.” Nice, clean, her boyfriend very very charming with an eye on one of the roommates. The bile at the end—something floating in the floating water. You may want to consider that he’s not totally on the mend. You focus on the magic of pity and mourning, a thief and an outlaw and a homosexual, just to spite society. Just long enough to breathe real air, for once. Getting sick on juice. Repeating “we” for the rhythm. Maybe he could be distant? They seemed prepared for that life, an escape into goodness and sainthood, dwarfish and wrinkled bodies, white milk pressed against those bloody cracked lips—only what the structure allowed them. I hope you experiment. It’s X’s term—and if you look X up you see it’s…

Some Mornings They Woke in an Entirely Other Flesh

The Terror:   Photographic, in a way, healthy as black ash. Sabotage, tonguelessness. A book of matches. Miriam buried to her neck, irretrievable, and Paul crawling across the yellow mud on his belly. I did not burn this one.                     Empty:   Sockets, her gums, a fashion much the same as memory. A buck knife or what he called a Bowie knife.                     My Intentions:   Cussing and behind them, a speck in the fields. Up to his haunches in water turned to steam. At my chest, tantalizing. Their usual fashion, sometimes Miriam was Paul, sometimes a blowtorch, the sour poison crusted to their cheeks. I carried a loaf of white bread, Paul managed to scrounge canned goods, extra sackfuls of corn, beans, peas, rice, tomato sauce. Like Donald Trump the blood cooling and opening and closing to the sky.                     Black Ash:   The blood photographic in memory, much the same as a buck knife or what he called Miriam. My chest, healthy as a blowtorch, cooling and opening. Tonguelessness turned to steam in their usual fashion: irretrievable, tantalizing, poison.

To _______:

I never slept with Robert Kloss and I never wanted to. Robert left for Japan and now I’m a country boy at heart so whenever I have the opportunity I remind you all of cryonically frozen bodies, scalped, beheaded, mangled steel and busted glass, populating a vast shimmering ocean of deadened grass. We became an insatiable fire. I've heard my book called a derivative novel but I disagree—my novel combines a sort of hard boiled The Da Vinci Code with such brutal fury that the last of our science and our natural urgings are snuffed. We killed every last savage impulse from our veins. Snuffed them on these wild fields. This is somewhat similar to my book though mine deals more with parody and adaptation and has a more complex set up.

Tommy was wearing the yellow shirt I made him.

She is drawn to the living room. There on the couch, in the perfect moonlight, rests the basketful of eggs. She glistens. Tom stands above, palms dripping, oh yes finally Tom oh God how lonely these

I kept going and going and my side hurt and my legs were heavy and hard and it didn’t seem like I’d got any closer. I sat on the steps. Cold and wet through my blue jeans. Then I heard a twig snap. Or thought I did. I thought I heard a twig snap somewhere out in the forest. So I held my breath to hear if there was any more. Often, in the darkness, I thought of her. Her nude form bathed in fire light. Included with this letter is a speculation on my wife—Wife?—Oh yes, in the darkness, my wife. She stitched this outfit herself. And she’s back to blushing and sputtering. Her breathing tube. The bandages barely covering the burned skin. Nothing about her dead family.

I am a good man, of high values and great courage.

You don’t want to marry him.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Robert Kloss
Salem, MA

topics later touched upon more eloquently

to read:

Anne Frank (cut)
Napoleon Bonaparte
Micky Spelane
Barack Obama
          (the dream was his father)
Ronald Reagan
William J. Broad
Homer
Tolstoy
(Baby, what was my name?)

that first night rats skittered past their windows

Be calm. We are fine.

The warmth on my arms and neck, impossible to imagine. We can work wonders together.

“No we can’t,” one sullen face says. Who knows but we all went crazy for the goon. I never thought about this before, but you got other clowns nobody really thinks of as clowns but they’re clowns all the same. The camera cuts to a longer shot, your soul, his cell phone, the guest, a question in regard to racial harmony. More controversial policies held my wrist all through the city: a sad clown, a happy clown, a buffoonish clown. The Confidence Man by Herman Melville. The Blacks: A Clown Show (play) by Jean Genet.

Really I don’t even think of myself as a businessman. I have no publication history but I hope you consider the threshold of death, you suckers and primitives.