exercise of lost inspiration

The only one here in the dream, I claim no doubt that could sound. So, lucky guy, the world is perfect the way it is—asleep in the bathroom at the gas station I worked inside your writing.

 

What I need best to think of the old days. Ears drip blood on the floor when he is thinking about you. In bed, living and waiting, breathing how I'll miss you.

 

The second person to follow me is the lunatic here signs his problem and goes though we both know we have only to be desirable in real life.

about jealousy in the aughts

I drove past your house five or six times that night, each time attending a funeral on the head of a screw.

I remembered you smoking outside in the stairwell while we huddled in the cold.

I remember all this like pillows on my face and pliers in my mouth. Disappear into that mountain in a brown study.

I cough my guts out, and clouds fall across the wall, the wall across the street falls before the sun. Master of manic episodes and creating them. 

 

about boarding positions around Christmas

I held Southwest boarding position A3. People were bunched up around the gate—baby strollers and wheelchairs and luggage and the A boarding group—but there was a little space where boarders A1 and 2 would stand, so I stood there.

 

A small black woman behind me started shooting anxious looks my direction. She suspected me of cutting in line and probably felt slighted.

 

A middle-aged white guy right behind me, probably a lawyer or accountant, also eyed me suspiciously while offering the woman more of the brain-deadening conversation he had evidently been killing the time with. It was the kind of commentary that only a perpetually positing hater of silence could offer a nervous, preoccupied woman: observations about the plane, about a trailer hooked up to the plane, about the time he flew as an unaccompanied minor, and, finally, about how preboarding was taking a while.

 

He continued serenading the nervous woman with these inanities until the preboarders got the go-ahead. Finally, she said to her co-sufferer of this linear injustice, "He"—meaning me—"must be number 1." Lawyer-accountant answered, "I'm 1. You're 2. I don't know what he is."

 

I turned and said, "I'm 3."

 

"He's 3," said our narrator. In any case, maybe they expected me to move. If I was them, I would have expected me to move. In fact, I'd be pretty irritated by me.

 

I usually would move, but this time I didn’t. I enjoyed the idea of them feeling tension I usually reserve for myself.

 

But soon more space opened up when the large number of wheelchair people and their dutiful escorts preboarded. The woman hesitated, then shifted around in front of me. The man soon followed. It was almost Christmas, after all, and, just in time, the world was set right once again.