The new restaurant in the old building still wears its shoe polish sign: "Grand Opening March 22nd." Only now it's April 11th so on slow days and nights it looks as though we still have to wait a year. Her daddy works at Hubcap Heaven where all of the halos are chrome. She sits in front of an English muffin pretending it's enough and, for no other reason than she simply saw a familiar shape in her waiter's watch, remembers a framed poem on her mother's living room wall that had what looked to be swastikas in every corner. It's damn hard to shoot a camouflaged bird with cloud white wings and blue eyes. A firm believer in credit card fraud, she tears up her receipt when she's ready to leave. Plowing through life at 78 keystrokes a minute and only lying about her age on resumes, she's been sex-less for months but the ghosts are her two favorite childhood dogs (Sadie and Dynamite) stand guard while she sleeps and that's better than sex. I'm in the corner of a restaurant down the street from all this happening, like a swastika in the corner of a poem in the corner of a memory.

The moon was big and red the night they scattered your ashes on a lake from an airboat near where you used to live. I got drunk on Irish whiskey and talked to a stranger about prostate cancer. The folk singer played you a song for me. I'm re-reading the beginning and still can't believe it. That we've gone from passing notes and failing classes to bleeding ink eulogies and never being able to say "You went bald before me." Maybe the ashes floated north to my backyard and helped me smoke half a pack of cigarettes. Or maybe they choked a fish to death. From our fragile years our bones have grown into weapons to fend for ourselves. The silent majority lobbying for later curfews, being able to bring dogs to school and exercising our right to be wrong. If you were still alive, I'd have you help me design a logo or flag for the Sacred Saint of Nothing, to wear proud like a veteran of future wars or pennies stuck to our faces from sleeping on floors. The fence was longer than the gate, which had a lock on it anyway. These bruised knuckles are for you. The hole in the door is too.

Most of this is daydreaming smooth sailing. Rusty anchor, gone to the bottom of a sea we’re strangers on. Summer slipped a few months back, made a small hole larger in the net so this winter we’ll be less likely to catch a cold or a break. Carving through a painting of Florida how the first Spanish explorers must’ve seen it, with a chisel and a hammer and a whole lot of Hank Williams Sr. Nobody I know has a telegraph or I’d wire them a, “Wish you were here. Look over there.”

There’s a herd of upside down horses stampeding around Heaven’s silver landmines, determined to tour every detour in Texas, no matter how illegible. Snowflakes shaped like Chinese throwing stars declare war on green grass and not-slick roads. I’m writing from horseback, feet chained to stirrups head filling up with blood, that there’s nothing refined about oil refineries and only the motivated factory workers get to smell like grease. It’s impossible to tell which clouds are clouds and5 which clouds are smoke or what He’s trying to tell us by molding them into pyramids and asterisks. Up ahead there’s a house on risers with a chimney digging into the horizon, but it’s easily negotiated in a wrought iron race to warn others of the impending blasts of sunshine that are sure to shatter all this. Under a bridge I learned “Leona’s a slut,” “Mark was here,” and “Jesus saves.” The bums already know this and still spend much of the night talking about what they were like before they were homeless. The muddy back road bayous massage the angry backbone of lands sore from supporting the undeserving and pickup trucks abandoned with grand pianos in the beds. Streamers and battery-operated strands of Christmas lights randomly splashed down from low-flying aircraft couldn’t put a dent in the ugly, spare-tire-speckled opera here, where the circle takes a square, and the photo-finish winner takes a flashbulb-blinded bow. Sweat bleeds through both pad and saddle. It’s time to make decisions: where to lay the body down, who to try to get to sing at the funeral. Nothing shines back from his black mirror eyes and the brow curls up in crescent moon hopelessness. It’s true, most true love is chock-full of lies, but I can promise there are only two bullets in this gun and one is just to see what it sounds like. I leave him surrounded by runway lights and road flares so he’s easier for the angels to find, and fire a single shot into the air just to see what it sounds like.

14 hours of angry driving and tailgating in a hurry to outrun the rain and a state I’ll fly to next time with nothing on his mind and a gift of fish on ice. Shreds of tires blown free from the wheels of long-haulers look like discarded alligator tails; black, sad, and wet on roadsides near Biloxi. The hazy eyes of brake lights keep progress moderate, like today’s Homeland Security terrorist threat. It’s fascinating to me that all America’s teenagers learned to dance the same dances in time for the arrival of rock ‘n’ roll. A thought, alongside memories of ex-lovers and sunburns, that keeps the whiskey-soaked soul of this truck rolling through sprays of ghost rain toward nothing.

All too appropriate, like a murder at Murder Creek, her tiara is the color of her dress when a tear hits it and the made-for-TV movie on in the other room is in the middle of a scene where “It’s My Party (and I’ll Cry if I Want to)” plays around actors I recognize from ‘80s sitcoms. And no one knows what to say so they talk about the cake. It’s half-vanilla / half-chocolate but I couldn’t give a shit. I’m on the back porch watching the tiny fireworks display of an effective bug light. I figure no words are better than words about nothing. If no one offers you a balloon to throw a knife at, you can’t not miss and win a big, inflatable crayon you’d rather not carry around the fair all night. Something like that. Sorry about that.

her desert heart, where cactus men stake claims and belly up to bars for dry martinis or Mexican beer, is a place I’ve only seen on TV, decorated with scorpions and cow skulls, old, unused railroads, freezing nights and scorching days.

She had a name like a planet knee-deep in January snow, on the side of a mountain overlooking mountains that were not as tall. The shoestring in her left boot was two shoestrings tied together. Every now and then she’d look around like she could hear something I couldn’t. Drinking what used to be hot tea from her dad’s Army canteen, her eyes would close as if to burn memories of this day onto the backs of her eyelids to enjoy whenever she wanted. I let her grab my wrists and throw me against a bank of leaf-less branches almost completely hidden by snow. The sunset lasted half a conversation about how pollution is responsible for the colors in the sky. Tomorrow this will be part of our pasts and it will feel good to burn under that magnifying glass which inspects each detail of every movement and crack of callused lips on canteens in the mountains. She was famous just for me, hibernating in a broken heart but not afraid to wake up. The ride home will seem shorter than the ride here, with her hand waving in the auto-breeze like a leaf-less tree and my head on the headrest burning this moment onto the backs of my eyelids to revisit whenever I want on lesser days.

Lounging in front of hotel AC, the coldest of all cooling units. If this pen dies, I’ll be totally alone, save for the “Songwriters Spotlight” on TV and a mosquito. On the outskirts of Little Rock and Memphis-bound, solo in a room with two double-beds. I’ve somehow managed to drop out of the lives of nearly everyone I know, with the exception of the TV and the mosquito. It’s a smoking room. Almost wish I had a pack of cigarettes to burn through in this lonesome, glorified rest stop. I wonder what the Alamo ghosts think of the gift shop.

Heaven smells like cigarettes and whiskey tonight, like a damp trench coat. If he wasn’t on the list, he gave Peter the finger and turned right around; the lazy side of his mouth sneered up in a smile. The luckiest, he followed her home. An original outlaw with the soul of a saint. Peter better know better and chase after and apologize and shake his hand and feel the strength of years in it. The angels could then welcome him on horseback and return the Highwayman to his promised land where he could shoot down shooting stars and hold her close again; weight and white hair gone, black boots checked at the door. Heaven smells like leather tonight as he pushes past the clouds and golden gates through the rolling hills and open air to the porch where he can sit now next to her with a guitar and play without blistering a finger and sing with the thunder.

The lonely planks on a porch long forgotten, on a road most white people avoid like the black plague, bend up at the ends, slowly pulling their nails out. And one day, if we're lucky we'll see them running down the street together in an awkward top-heavy hobble. Tonight I'm going to paint the sky plaid so that it looks like a shirt I use to have, and I'm going to wear the hell out of it, even after I tear the sleeve on a star. I'm going to put a Van Halen patch over that tear and think about this shirt the whole way home to keep from having to count streetlights or people hunched over in vacant lots, pushing shopping carts, with lice breeding on the clothes inside. If I ever come across a dead rhinoceros I will not cut the horn from its face even if that’s all I need to finish a life-size model of a rhinoceros I’ve been working on.

I just tore a piece of the sky back and found static: a community of origins and original sins; angry, misinterpreted waves of fly eggs in spider webs. You kept me up late with your roadtrip soundtrack and I forgot to call my dad. Return to me lifted, prepared to stand upright against the wind, with tribal drum dances echoing hope in strangers’ hands; when I can strike the stars down with lit filament ease and stand upright alongside you against the wind.

Two girls have walked a block and left silhouettes on the DON’T WALK sign. Low-ride drivers zipped by close enough to tear hair from their arms. Drop change in the meter, please, and hurry back. All these dynamite sticks waving and giving each other hugs make me cringe. I don’t want to blow up by the broken plants on the waist-high wall with glasses on and knees drawn to my chest. If suddenly Elvis were to appear across the street on the courthouse roof playing a ukulele trying not to cry, I would nod to The King and shed a tear. On behalf of my generation I would like to apologize.

It’s getting cooler and I’m hallucinating, not the change in weather but the shadows that suggest there’s someone behind me. The slightest movement has set her dog off. Now I have no idea what she’s thinking: a burglar masked in black face paint come to bark open the dog and creak open the gate? Waking up a second-story exhibitionist who’s standing in the window offended. Again I see shadows and tell myself, “It’s just the trees.” That kind of silence that envelopes everything, even air itself, is sweeping over me. I can’t speak ‘cause I don’t want to scare myself. I can’t move ‘cause I don’t want to do something wrong. In this sort of quiet even ghosts hold their breath. I hear the metallic drip of my car going to sleep — unless that’s actually the sound of a bored ghost tapping on still parts under the hood biding his time until — “It’s just the trees.” That goddamned dog is probably still barking unaware that outside darkness has devoured everything. And the burglar she thought she heard is walking, holding his breath, while I clutch a winter pain in my chest; an indicator species at the end of a summer rope fixing myself a slipknot scarf.

Maniacal chirping birds in my ear I wish you were here to hear. Some sort of insect’s nest or insect’s eggs on the window reminds me of my fingerprints showing through the glass at the diner last night when I drank and paid attention. Spread too thin to break on the backs of tall trees that (from a distance) look almost billowy and pillow-y. Multi-layers-of-clothing weather. The wind nails my eyelids shut and sews that guy’s cigarette to his lips. (glad I quit) Never a dull moment in a world with so many sharp edges.

suffers from bachelor madness can’t jump-start long enough makes sure the dog’s in before going out blows around aimlessly with a kick behind him considers explosions isolating every cigarette splashing ashes on the highway sits on the roof with gravel in his shoes contrasts superhero spark and phone booth fool.

The mildew on the porch pockets created the illusion of corner carpets and though the strange lime color attracted sweeter insects, it was poison as many women are poisonous. An idea appeared like a light bulb above my friend’s head. I soon noticed, however, that a light bulb shape is not entirely unlike that of a question mark, so I doubted his bright idea as I know he doubts himself. The shingles that topped the apartments off made me think of London at night; not only the shingles, but the headlights in the distance wrestling with the fog. But I’ve never been to London so I don’t know where I get off.

I wanted her to ask for change she never did. Too busy hanging her head over the railing observing maybe or thinking about jumping. The coin return abused its power and outside, between seats in her car, I’m sure she had it — change, I mean not power — and it multiplied at drive-thru windows. For all the stars, no one could imagine who she wanted to call so bad. Such a lucky person at what could’ve been the end of a lucky line. And what if she needed a ride? It couldn’t be me. I was too busy hanging my head and thinking about writing about jumping.

I’m alive with the chill of the season Brisk is my body, bold is my brain I’m finally awake I have my overcoat Your top teeth crush your bottom lip and I’m moved. The frost eye patches on the squirrel corpse and the emptiness in the trees tell me I’ve paced anxiously all year, rolling beans into bestsellers, but now it’s here arrived beaten to burgundy to kiss the ground kill the engine silence the melody.

I held tight to chaos until he buckled at the knees and spat foam, cut my middle finger on a bottle cap and waited for something else to happen, met your smile with a sneaky shift of my eyes and a defeatist’s shrug. I saw too early in life dogs deliver brothers into madness. I’ve never had an affiliation with reconciliation.

It roared to life the engine sank and the jungle threw its vines like snake hands into my eyes, pulled me behind a garbage can and drove staples into my fingernails so I could scream more violently down chalkboards. [quick pace between buildings the cold chases the balls back] It roared to life and the lady said to herself and to other ladies later, “That man in that car writing must (‘ve) be (en) crazy.” She’ll slip on something soon enough, something to get her hair wet and make her think straight.

Love lost in the embrace of two snakes on a walkway smoldering like coals under a boil living life outside the lines. She’s sucked in her gut locked her elbows and left fingerprints. His foot was up and you could’ve shown a movie on their smiles. It was silver screen.

I feel the urge to downsize throw everything I don’t need away everything I’ll never read away or take it down to the Salvation Army and let them feel it up and sell it or gun it down and bury it. A smaller home means fewer things. A well-lit room blinds the boogeyman better and keeps him under the bed where he belongs. So long as he’s keeping the moths out of my clothes and the dust off my Bible he’s keeping himself busy which keeps him happy which keeps me happy. Good neighbors throw smiles down their driveways. I’ve never been so surrounded. Might be nice in that new-to-me kind of way. One thing though, gotta keep all the locks on make sure the security bulbs work let a couple snakes make homes in your roses.

A stray dog’s barking up a rabid storm in the hedges below my bedroom window, free of leash and longing for a handshake. I never got to see the morning pig stocky and fog-trotting down the dirt road but the stray dog keeps me company. Living in fear is always more fun than living without living.

Once more am I scattered. This newfound and omniscient cleanliness, while nice, provides no pleasant feeling and an inexplicable desire to organize. The spirit and soul of a thousand roads is adrift in the naked night air and the only damage is half a clamshell for the labor that set the raft streaking across tissue-thin layers of evolution simmering on a gut-full of idle ambition. Heel-to-toe the worries parade around the floor leaving me no room to pace. A rainy day sure can make clock hands hurry their revolutions and rain can sure bring out the features of characters in beat-up brown leather who leave their umbrellas at home. Discovering and rediscovering passion and heart attacks with four holes in my foot for the rain to soak through lying on train tracks with a penny on my forehead hoping that I may be your lucky day. The attic is empty and anything important has been reduced to memory. Stars no longer strike me as “awesome.” People no longer strike me as “odd.” I’m seal-slick and obvious, completely content, an arm’s length away from communications, face up in anger, searching for some kind of hip new age miracle. The webs are spun. The fire’s out. (if only crutches could make me move faster) Here we spend days too aware, balled up in a fetal position. Nights we spend losing owl-eyed staring contests to mirrors. Tongue-tied and weary of hearing myself think haggard and old, thick with verbiage. Into the bridge with gum on my shoe four holes in the chair I’m nearly asleep in — nearly asleep by — bullet in the shin. The outline of the branches makes a jagged heart-shape against the moonlight and every last spring in my mattress is out. Picture frames stand tall in the forefront — empty — the tip of this pencil is broken and sharper than it’s ever been. The chimney on our glass house is missing a brick I can’t stand it so I sit perfectly still in the center of whatever fully aware that 60 seconds will always be exactly 60 seconds long feeding on air with my elastic lungs. I’m talking myself into a corner with a stutter. Can’t write fast enough to remember the phone number. And when I finally do merge in — finally rid myself of these origami appendage acquaintances — I’ll be automatic with a new ability to realize so blow my mind when I close my eyes.

“Every day I love you a little more,” it said and I felt good with no one around to notice or ask me why. It was in a bag next to a box of chocolate that I still haven’t eaten. I’d spell “Forever” on her back in kisses if I could, but I’ll settle for drawing a heart on her stomach with my finger.

Thought I’d quit the drinks, the streets, the lying to myself but I’m still lying to myself. And I thought you’d only be tossed into my life once but now Fate’s intervened and played a solid hand. Caterpillars crawl out of the walls and dangle down on spider webs. Remnants of fragments of memory are swept away and crushed into a block of familiarity. It’s easy to keep a drunk’s attention: simply spur him in the side with your elbow and offer another of whatever he’s close to done with and continue talking. He’ll hang on your every word like he’ll hang on every shoulder on his way out. I really shouldn’t go down that path and be like that, but I know as soon as this shift is over and my hands are hot I’ll drive to that block and level myself. You’ve got my attention, now what are you going to do with it? Every week I promise myself I’m turning over a new leaf only to find that there are dozens of the same leaves underneath and they’ve been chewed on by caterpillars and it smells like fire. Swim with the clown in the drunk tank. Drown him when you need a bloated body to float on. I should’ve had an affair with my high school English teacher just to have it.

Went a week without a kiss had to chew on my own lips on a rickety dock with reptiles and brown water beneath hooks in monsters’ teeth. Fishing for thousands of minutes and pterodactyl wings in straw hats and hand-made archer gardens. I’ll never see another naked back — never know another naked back — facing me on a bed with reptiles and brown water beneath in twilight whispers and day-break shivers. I’ll never know but I’m still fishing for.... ... .. . I don’t even know what anymore.

For some holes punched in posters pinkies sprained after collapsing, she’s asleep on the floor with a bed above her creatures tugging at her hair. I dog paddle over try to be her buoy try to set things straight but the wrinkles and kinks of time passed are drawn too tight to dot my Is and cross my Ts and sign my name in cigarette smoke on her dresser drawer.

3 hours ahead of me nearly 15 behind me and a red comet carpet of stars to watch over me. Driving through a Carpal Tunnel down a blind man’s highway gripping a Braille wheel. I don’t ask questions nobody offers answers so spur the bank until blood money pours out of the safe. I was one of the chosen few but was laid off. I was one of the broken spokes but I snapped off. An elephant never forgets. Eventually they’ll all come back for their tusks.

Midnight wraps around my neck and chokes me to sleep. Always inspired by the damndest things ... Bare-chested vampire bites on my legs. A spiral of regrets and unprotected sex. Paranoia ghosts down from the ceiling and startles me. Brittle bones left behind from the rotting carcasses of slow-motion thought processes are now bleached by the sun and picked clean by vultures. Evaporate soon and take me with you up from the crowd into the city sky dodging pollution neon lights bullets of rain.

She didn’t just put the cigarette out, she made love to the ashtray. The jukebox wasn’t just broken, it was forcing me to think. With the exception of the girl on roller skates everybody in the place was a skin and straps identity crisis. Somehow she had class. A bar is a watering trough for drunks and pigs. We give it new meaning by gracing it with our presence and making it ours, but it’s still the same old trough. I wonder how many people here have sober friends elsewhere thinking about them. I wonder if the huge mirror behind me has aliens or doctors behind it. I wonder why I never bring a designated driver like I promised myself I would when I was in fourth grade learning about drugs and alcohol. Different night. Same place. Same people. Different names. The worst thing about being a writer is getting an idea and losing it before you can find paper.

On the night after my funeral I want someone to hurl a Molotov cocktail into a fireworks warehouse. Remember me in smoke, sounds, and sparks for the gods and monsters that have been shot down by helicopters. And I want someone to let Superman out of his pen remind him of larger waters and watch him crawl to swim.

Dogs know when you’re leaving. They know when you send an imposter in to feed them. Whether in the air or hair or tail, they know. Right after you read this sentence, I want you to picture a friend and think about what he or she might be doing right this instant. [go] The world spins so fast it’s impossible to underline every day.

A sore on the arm and an evolved growth on the finger to hold this pen steady. It nearly functions automatically: eats, sleeps, and breathes for fuel and burns its way downstairs. I imagine The Future and it is without sun, without streetlights or smiles and action figures are obsolete. The ocean is salt-less, deserts are sponges, snow spills out of the sky like blood. It’s as bleak as an old writer’s attic as hard to avoid as a bad habit. (notice no one ever says “good habit.” notice a lot of old writers have beards. weird.) The arm rests buckle and cities separate. The banks crack open their safes until money doesn’t matter and it’s back to the barter. More people are fishing again fewer people are living. More people would be reading if there were any books left. Science has all but killed itself doctors have rattled the rhyme and reason out of every bone. The wealthy peer out at a blank horizon and thank Christ for their parents. The middle class is held back a year and the lower class is gone altogether. Kids aren’t so fat in my sleep-deprived late-night sketch of The Future.

Sunday people. Sun in the eyes is the needle in the arm. Running on two-and-a-half hours of sleep, sputtering out in my seat. She makes great faces and has a weakness for Ye Olde English epic period pieces. Surprisingly, I have no problem making it home without dying, unless you count the death of energy and Alzheimer’s exhaustion. Then I’m dead. Fucking real dead. But it was worth it. Fucking real worth it to lie awake on a marshmallow comforter next to her with her glasses off, a big star dangling above me, butterflies in the corner and James Dean.

Fake snowflakes. Me at a new job by myself on a Monday. Nothing to do. No crimes to commit. No patrons to patronize or chase around. A friend in the Army. A friend in the church. A few friends with babies. A few with wedding rings. The only real difference between stores at the mall and homeless people is that the stores have more money and the streets are cleaner. They beg the same. They drink the same rain. Life is still except for what the AC spins. But there is eye candy, a girl who works at the Santa photo place. Santa’s Little Helper. She entertains kids all day, drives a remote-control-something around. Slim, with long, curly, black hair and probably not quite Forever 21. And that’s okay. She’s simply a way to make each day easier on the eyes. You have cigarettes, I have roaming retinas that suck in and soak up my environments. John Lennon’s singing “so, this is Christmas.” He died 22 years ago yesterday. Well played, John.

a heart vacant as the bare white walls decorated with only a van gogh replica. she put on poses by rufus wainwright and we sat in the dim light i knew it was wrong but i drank anyway and she got high. the floating flower candles in the bowl started sparking. unusual for candles. they were eating themselves to the bottom. i guess it felt better than drowning. and rufus crooned to the white walls and weed. without eating or sleeping or fucking, i said “goodnight” and she walked me to my truck. our bodies are small cemeteries forever burying memories.

Pinstriped bathroom walls. He doesn’t want to go back out there. His red, troubled face doesn’t have to move its mouth to ask the mirror, “Who are the brains behind this operation?” The overwhelming scent of urinal cakes, like bubblegum, surrounds him in his gamble. Olivia Newton-John sings through the ceiling. He’s been in here a long time, hopelessly devoted to finding an alternate exit. “I could say it was something I ate,” he reasons, between rummaging his mind for assistance. He really doesn’t want to go back out there. “I can pretend nothing happened. I didn’t see or hear a thing. Everything is exactly as it should be. As it was yesterday.” The door swings open and he frantically turns on the faucet and starts washing his hands, watching the man move behind him with the mirror he was previously staring at himself in. The man goes to a stall. Paranoid turns the water off. “Great. Well. Here goes nothin.’” Upon leaving, he notices the floor is the same: fax machines dialing, pinstriped suits walking, some on phones, some of their eyes glance over and find his eyes and keep talking. Cameras are watching. He cautiously but impatiently returns to his office and closes the door with a sigh that flicks beads of sweat from his upper lip. He’s eleven floors from the ground but that doesn’t keep him from wondering if he should climb out. The huge tinted window forces him to stare at himself again. The clock ticks. And. Ticks. And. Ticks. And. Ticks. And. Ticks. And. Ticks. The door swings open. He spins to see a grinning colleague who’s already talking but it’s all like Charlie Brown’s teacher — “Mah mah. Mah mah mah mah” — until he asks, “Hey, man, are you okay? What’s wrong?” (You can bet your ass he heard that) “Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s exactly as it should be. As it was yesterday.”

Cold as a fox in the snow albino month pans out gray and quiet with a bullwhip on both ends. Our washer and dryer battle it out to see which one is loudest. Our makeshift fireplace will surely be used and be blind soon. I positioned myself like an author at a glass tabletop altar with a beer I wished was colder in a chair we bought from our neighbor, ready to write a story long and hard and soft, documenting nothing but my own meandering thoughts. But now I’d rather just sit here with this beer in our neighbor’s old chair and enjoy the stillness of the pool water and the always-ringing of crickets. The AC has clicked on now and puts the washer and dryer to shame. Japan has never seemed farther away. All I’d need tonight are some fireflies and those flowers we drank from at grandma’s house and you’d be here with me or we’d be in a tent in the backyard with snot frozen to our noses and lips and my brother trying to scare us. The woman fears nostalgia. I feed off it. In a present boring and too certain staring down the barrel at a future sought after yet uncertain, all that we have is the past. Ours sewn up with tires rolling over heads and accidental backflips, swift kicks to the groin and rude dogs stealing our empty cups. None of that happens anymore. Children get to live in movies. I should be writing you a letter but I’m writing you this from across miles of dark water. The proud, the few, the kid who seemed convinced my dad had lassoed Santa. Never thought this was where I’d end up, drinking a beer in my neighbor’s ex-chair, an unknown soldier of something writing about a soldier I’d give anything to be sharing this beer and this time with now. Still walking around the briar patches and the cactus, enthralled and in love, older and fatter and wiser. The haunted dogs, they’ll tear your face off. Rocks through Slip ‘n Slides, they’ll break the skin, but only if you let them. The water will wash away the bad blood.

Costa Rica’s sun beats down upon a beauty I won’t see again until December 19th, the day my roommates pack up and drive to Kansas for Christmas, leaving me alone with the ghosts. I’ll give them the gift of skin so they don’t feel so out of place, lips to help me polish off bottle of whiskey after bottle of whiskey, hands so they can play poker with, and bet against, me and turn off the TV if I fall asleep. Present, Past, Future, and assorted dead, they can share my bed. I’ll take the floor. (What are friends for?) The story of our lives: Sleepless Nights, passing through walls chasing termites. I’m see-through too. They can tell I’m thinking of you. Moving through today without even realizing it’s today, supposedly working on something and driving a car oblivious to road as they’re oblivious to the idea of mortality. Keeping me company, beating off loneliness in a house in a town that’s somehow tricked itself into feeling satisfied. But not today. Not December 8th. Today I’ve convinced it otherwise.

The candles burn not so bright tonight, casting shadows of shit I don't need onto walls that keep us separated, that catch Nick Cave before he can sneak out and climb trees, drunk on moonshine with Townes, who I let slip out a week or so ago with the windows up. These sounds are for me and me alone to swim in or float on when my arms get tired of moving this pen and lifting this Boylan to my childish lips that spit back into my head all the shit I never said. The hiatus is over. The bough’s about to break. Cat Stevens knows it, as do the cats who come around, looking up at me with alien eyes as if to say, "Okay. Any day now." And so it goes, as I've known all along, the rejects we're proud of, the rejects who would accept us, they're no kind of heroes. Towels thrown over the shoulders of someone coughing up blood on the bathroom floor with the shakes, they're no kind of capes. But they're there for us to wipe the blood from our chins and hold our hair back and punch us gently in the arm to say, “Attaboy.” And so it goes and we will go down in history as sissies, as frightened men, capable only of taking a stand together, armed with safety in numbers, boomboxes on our shoulders, bibles of youth in hand, closed with hard covers, ready to rumble with the thunder of Fate's hooves galloping toward us, down the mountain, gaining momentum, spurred in the sides by cold riders with high calibers and bullets of logic and reason, old age, and mass hysteria. We will stand our ground, willing to get blood on our bibles and drown out the screams with songs.

I’ll remember the siding of a Winnebago when asked to recall our first night together. And the thousand yard stares of drunks slicing through the smoke like haphazard lighthouses manned by ghosts, the way every car that drove by wasn’t my ride, the wristbands assuring lonely bartenders that I was legal stacking up side by side like odds over evens and the sympathy of rush hour. I’ll shrug off all attempts at convincing myself to believe in fate with an, “I’m just glad I was still sober enough to notice,” but in those minutes before sleep when you order hope with a side of dreams, I’ll believe.

They came with shovels, pickaxes and dirty faces, in unwashed linens with mouths to feed. They came at the drop of a hat without a pot to piss in or windows to look out of at home lured by the promise of a full day’s work and half day’s pay in a country rife with violence. They gathered ‘round with little choice to board an old school bus. There was no ticking, no worrying, during their last seconds on earth. And their families will receive no letters of sympathy from a government that exists only in their dreams.

A white minivan loves Jesus and America. It says so on the back. “Freedom” “Proud to be an American” “Real men love Jesus” and something like, “The People in the Name of Jesus” (in lousy small print). He should make a sticker that says, “Proud to Be Jesus” or “Free Jesus,” with a picture of a pregnant Mary on it. If I believe in God, I believe he has a sense of humor. I think he’d get a kick out of that. Corner of Ashford and Bay on an end-of-the-summer day, gathering my thoughts and feeling good about the tea drying up that I spilled on my leg when the lid of my cup came off. They’re not all out to get you. Most of them don’t even know who you are.

Doctors prescribe illness long enough to stay in business. Finished out the work week without wisdom teeth. (take that, motherfuckers!) Now most, if not all, of the pain is gone. Today I drank through a straw. After I shut my bedroom door, I could’ve sworn I heard a little girl behind me say, “Hello?” though there was no one else home, just me and the dogs and dogs can’t talk. A mission easy to retreat from. Black and white life. More than enough fear to keep you warm. Rebels sticking to bus seats, talking hard to women with good intentions and their zippers down. Doctors prescribe illness. (We were framed. We were all framed.) A cold shock to the system. Duct tape your shoe picked up when you cut across the construction site waving goodbye. Or was it hello? Like the girl I couldn’t see in my bedroom said, “Hello?"

Four-odd years from a high school reunion. Burning minutes to the filter. It’s high time we heard the cattle call and moved toward their bellows, surprised ourselves like a car accident. “Take a break … see my friends … sleep.” - the kid in front of me, talking to his mom. It’s reunion day. Pressing flesh and kissing babies. You don’t have to fire blanks into the air to understand distance, eat so fast your stomach bursts and muddy food really sticks to your ribs. The pounds will be with you longer than the taste. The years will turn into lines all over your face so that every time you look into a mirror you remember.

“On a day like this with someone like you,” he began, years ago in a meaningless math class. I’m right here for now looking back. I used to be drunk, probably only several times a month but it felt like every day. Dry bones from dry heaving and making “I’m gonna kill you” eyes at strangers, men and women, from behind beer goggles of intolerance. Still surprised I never wrapped my truck around a telephone pole or smashed into a kid or house. Surprised I ever barely made it home to the couch to kick one shoe off with whatever movement I could muster and pass out with no pillow and no blanket and never woke up cold. The headaches and bruises from uncertain origins were souvenirs to place gently on our mantles of memories as they crumbled over a fireplace. Months passed and we laughed along with no recollection and no idea what was happening. “On a day like this,” he began, years ago. “sobriety is overwhelming,” I continued (right here, right now). “But brief,” he added quietly, from across the country.

if you stare at someone long enough eventually you’ll catch their eye. throw it back smack it with a baseball bat with the force of a racehorse because you didn’t recognize anyone in the home movies because two people care about you hard enough to squeal when you say the right thing or even the wrong thing. this rash better be gone when I wake up. the kids in the living room were bored. it was written all over their faces in 100 different languages. maybe that’s why you didn’t recognize anybody. their faces were shrouded in Hebrew and Japanese and poor penmanship. but no one was paying attention until you played their favorite song and opened up the evening like a bad Brink’s job, showering cash on those faces smearing words in 100 different languages. they waited their turns to perform and amaze us. your angst was as sincere as a well-rehearsed cover song and so am I. circles of friends sick little support groups. a few spokes snap and the whole wheel collapses and you’re left with cake on your face and there are eggs in cakes. bound on/for the floor playing Russian roulette with a gun you made with a finger and thumb.

The warehouse was dark and all their disco suits were pressed so as not to collect sweat. For every hair I lost worrying about tomorrow, a new child was born. They shouted to hear their voices bounce off the brick walls and startle the trapped birds. With shoulders against the doors and backpacks thrown over those shoulders and panic in those backpacks, they held fast. Some were too fat for words some could run around in the shower and not get wet but they held fast, kicking at the fallen to remind them to help taking turns taking smoke breaks. Their chests were heaving in and out so they must’ve been breathing in and out, singing to the wood, singing from their souls around panting and tasting sweat that tasted like fear, like motivation, like everything worth saving. Sleep on your sorrows, brothers and sisters, the best is yet to come. Rest is yet to come when you can calm down and call your mom just to ask if she’s had a good day. The warehouse is dark but I can hear them and the trapped birds’ wings beating against their chubby bodies. It’s an arrangement difficult to dance to but easy to appreciate, sort of like these words which have a bad habit of undermining every endeavor but they look okay on paper.

My mornings are decorated with the neck-snaps of prostitutes and lines of truckers holding convenience store sausage/egg/& cheese biscuits. I've grown accustomed to sitting on a quiet couch alongside another unnecessary heartbreak, not speaking but knowing damn good and well that if you count to three and rip it off, it stings a lot less. Night, now, is just a darker version of day. Sometimes I start out in my bed, drive over to her bed, stare at the ceiling and count the number of times I hear the cat's tag click against the wood floor. He counts down the hours until he sees my feet and ankles stumbling around stupid, looking for socks and shoes. I am a drunk tree trunk to him. He is a cat-shaped clock to me. She is wonderful to us. Even when she plays a little rough. The power lines on country roads have a way of keeping time in southern slopes; picking up speed when they hit the poles and swooping back down and back up and back down. We were those power lines one night when we drove around and burned up fuel trying to put the fire out. I suspect you've accepted we're lost causes wrapped in green mirrored Christmas paper, showing the ugly world to itself with more than a hint of our favorite color? Okay. As long as it's green. I expect to be gone before the city finishes the new parking garage. It's only going to block the breeze and my view of prostitutes rubber-necking at nice cars and bums that look like indie rockers. Nothing's safe and everyone’s convinced themselves they're not certain if what they're doing is wrong. It's easier said than done. I found the smell of her hair on a piece of my pillow even though it'd been a while since she’d been there. The morning was decorated with glimpses of my future: half of the bullets were bottle caps, the other half was still bullets, and she was going to France.

The click of a filmstrip on a "Free Day" in 7th grade punches me in the face 13 years later on a Wednesday. A glass hawk with marble eyes makes sure I'm not up to no good. And I'm not. It's okay, hawk. The night folds in on itself like wrapping paper on the side of a square box, but like how mom does it (perfect), with no fringe from scissors trying to fix a fuck up. Pewter pieces bent at the joints set the scene: Clever drunks above a bakery in front of computers and playing cards in tiny wooden chairs whittled down from toothpicks fragile as the feeling you get on a road at 4:48 a.m. when you're certain every other pair of headlights is coming from a one night stand or murder. Autumn is inspiring to roll the windows down and check out corporate asses in office pants or a girl fixated on her rearview mirror to see if that hickey's still there (it is). A low jump champion wondering if Jesus keeps tabs on people who steal coffee cups from Denny's or coasters from bars. He probably doesn't. She's probably fine. Early morning phone calls usually mean trouble. Fingers run through the hair of yesterday's frustrations until it's too thin to comb, and soon too thin to run fingers through. Locked in a heated battle with balance and time frames. Jeremiah wasn't a bullfrog. Jeremiah wasn't anything Teach me to speak Creole. Tell me how to say something you would say to someone if they were giving you shit and how to talk dirty to a girl without her knowing it. Icemakers work overtime. They work when you and I are sleeping. That's dedication. The same kind of dedication it takes to learn how to leave properly. Night classes just aren't good enough.

at a casino in Amsterdam he throws caution to the wind bets the gambler, not the hand, and walks away with 250 euros. Fleetwood Mac breathes through a speaker with a sinus problem but children still get older and I get older too. David appears and disappears and reappears smelling like permanent markers and notebook paper never smiling and I get older too. the last hurricane destroyed the already decrepit roof over the stables at Equestrian Park and some of the more motivated children used the sturdier planks for skateboard ramps (built their lives around you). the sleepy horses, like elder statesmen, survived, relocated to the general manager's private farm. and when they die from snakebites or natural causes some of the more motivated children will use their manes as brooms to sweep all this under the rug.

I sat at Alfonso's eating a Sicilian in a booth where I could see above and beyond the Christmas bow on the handle of a glass door no one ever used, stained by too many washes that were heavy on the soap, past the Video Camera Surveillance sign (red base / white type) that was backwards to me. And I watched them wheel an empty gurney to the ambulance across the street at Edgewater High. The lights were on and EMTs, some taller than others, stood next to it talking. I pictured a mother, upon finding out just how much an ambulance ride costs, calling the whole thing off and sending her asthmatic daughter to bed without supper. Then I remembered a kid whose name I can't remember, a kindergarten classmate (circa 1985). The memory begins with the girl-ish screams young ladies have in common with young boys and ends with our class being paraded out of the room, right alongside Nameless Kid, who's on the floor with medical personnel surrounding him, trying to keep him calm. I swear there were other exits we could've used. It's not like the place was on fire. When we saw him at school again days later, he had cotton in his ear — maybe both ears — and it reminded me of balled-up white bread; which may be why, to this day, I don’t eat white bread. That same year some friends and I were made to sit in Time Out for leaving the perimeter fence of the playground to look at an egg that had fallen out of a bird's nest. These memories live so near each other they borrow salt and pepper from one another when other memories need flavor. And fire rescue rides away. And an old man at the bar explains to another old man at the bar that an ambulance ride can cost you $7/mile.

because Betco rhymes with Petco and the pennies under my truck fighting to stick to the gravel against an onslaught of parking lot river are just biding their time (buying their time). because true love exists only in the choruses of Tony Bennett songs and in that inch of space between shoe and dance floor. because I like the way my hair looks in the rain, segmented and crazy like I might be holding a concealed weapon or know answers to really hard math problems. because someday a millionaire with a sense of humor is going to build a day spa called Resort to Violence. because the fact of the matter is the only thing that's ever mattered is fiction and how many lies we can tell in a given amount of time measures our worth against the determination of kids who died in clothes dryers during ambitious games of hide n seek.

it's hotter in the Philippines tonight than it is in Florida, with Jesus' shoulder to cry on there and me sitting in a bulldozer here, pointed at a playground I vaguely remember and a church I have one memory of. “Father Abraham had many sons / many sons had Father Abraham / I am one of them and so are you / so let's all praise the Lord, right arm!” what did it even mean? ushered in with the fear that the stained glass angels might actually start blowing their trumpets and the windows would shatter and they would fly off. harmless enough, but still scary. I am not certified to operate this bulldozer nor was I authorized to “borrow” it. took my glasses off to keep the headlights of passing cars from giving away my position. I want the cops to come before I start this thing up but I'm sure they have better things to do. if they'd only show up though, I'd gladly climb down and into one of their cars (hopefully one with AC) without a fuss or a single word. and I'd sleep in the back while they drove in circles.

in the morning we'll rest on our elbows and laurels watching The Price is Right. immunity is my Ace in the hole, the Bicycle Spade Ace with all the card manufacturer information on it. neither will speak neither will have to the city’s lights will blink and keep time overnight until the rest of its people are awake. there'll be a smile and a hug, not a handshake. handshakes are for doctors. the soundtrack to another film is the soundtrack to right now whether I like it or not. whether or not you hear it too. all I need is for John Cusack to show up and for it to start raining and I'll be able to enjoy the drive home.

your bed is a battleground where hearts and body parts fight it out, sticking to sheets and twigs and crumbs, rolling through recesses and field trips to planetariums to see stars cling to heaven like dead celebrities. freckles on your chest and my crooked teeth clenched for every dead soldier and limping lieutenant who held fast to their empty guns and raced forth with bent bayonets. this will soak up rainwater on the side of the street next to a For Rent sign and never be treasured as a historical site. but I'll know better until the next drink dropkicks this memory out of my head so hard the helmet doesn't feel a thing. veterans of the longest war, retiring to bar stools and drinking on Uncle Sam's dime. on the lam, draft dodgers lived longer than patriots. in your golden years please carry a flag that is really a sheet to my headstone and cover me one last time in love and sticks and crumbs.

Maybe mom was right. Maybe this is a good place to die and rest forever with the squirrels. Music used to mean so much. Now, after the sudden passing a few weeks ago, I wonder why I care so much. The importance of a timeless lullaby tucking soft babies in glows against the darkening of a sky without birds. A secondary relationship; doctors can sew sons and husbands up and keep life alive with tubes, monitors, more tubes, and needles. A long-ago bond we broke with years. I should call and let you know I’m sorry but I wouldn’t know where to begin. Love, dust, and spare tires. I couldn’t remember her name until I remembered the van where it was written.

Can’t complain about this year so when the ball drops and the bombs drop I’ll watch as one might watch a puppet show or a film or a film about puppet shows. They’re ticking, be sure of it and Jesus has mounted his broomstick. For those atop houses with binoculars and nachos, befriend the FBI and don’t take your eyes off the sky. Be paranoid be superstitious. It’s healthy. Trust me. I’ll be fishing, taking time to reel in a toss-back and take in a toss-up. Be afraid of the big wick in Times Square and repent until you’re blue in the face. Don’t choke on the ticker tape when your jaw drops when the ball drops and the bombs drop. Nurse your need for a dose of a reason to be. Smack your lips and count down 10, 9, 8, 7 6, 5, 4, 3 Chin up to strap on your helmet, your Army-issue goggles, your underwater breathing apparatus. Dive into the ribcages of others nearby and hide from the firework war and the flood. This is your resolution: to climb into nests high above the high water mark, sit still enough to not rock the lifeboat or casbah. Needles to scratch my wrists with and scar and mix and fade this day into the dissolve of another day. A double zero year the year of the loser and sideways 8. Scratch your wrists and mix and pave your way into the dissolve of another day. They’re out in the streets and raising their arms to embrace the fat of a cowardly nation. But this is just a run-through, a dress rehearsal, on the stage set to debut at midnight, after the pine’s abandoned to the street side and the stockings are plucked from the wall and you’ve shocked yourself taking down icicle lights and there are plans to return unwanted gifts. There’s still money to burn, airline ticket prices to soar, there’s still turf to burn, time to burn, highway to leave behind, cannons to load to fire babies into space, geniuses to outsmart, confessions to come clean, prophecies to fulfill, works to dissect up on caffeine for days in a hangover casket with a gray head and a bottle of aspirin. Stomach aches from surrendering the lining to acid, ignoring the suffering suffix, passing out in an oxygen booth in front of 24 hour surveillance. This is your party if you choose to accept it. I’ll be more than happy to cater to your guest list. A crater for a dead race past-tense abolish to polish a good cause. Clasp your hands together behind your head. We’re gonna frisk you up and fuck you up and let you down, meet all your expectations and then some, make good your silly predictions and cast some of our own. Fortune-cookie-hungry for excuses and explanations, reasons to be happy on a Monday and every other day of the week. Your pink slip is here now.

The centerpiece of an uncomfortable triangle table in a different city. Tonight cops are stationed at the tents to keep would-be art thieves from snatching generic still lifes. Nature (is astonishing) seascapes horses in fog by trees in this city. Barflies speak bar fights break out accordingly. I am a walking shadow, a pedestrian by choice and because the car is but a few blocks away. Somebody bought a gun because somebody is throwing away the box of a gun case. For one birthday, I broke a heart and, for another, I volunteered my own and my time immobile in a deserted home in a different city where a headless Mary stands guard to keep would-be soul thieves from walking off with the best of us and two churches (I think I write “and” too much) to patch together trivial thoughts, aimless as the shadow I was marching to my car parked a few blocks away. The drive-in thanks you, Mayor! I dragged my hand along a picket fence — brown, not white, as some cliché junkies might’ve hoped — and expected splinters or at least one, really long splinter. I was spared like the ex-stray I cradle when he lets me. Like now.

Just a position a creaky hinge I meant to oil acting as a doorbell. The ugly hours can’t hide from me I’m onto those motherfuckers pretending to be asleep on the couch in my underwear. Just pretending. I catch ‘em like rabbits in bear traps fast and sad and grotesque pale and powerful making noises I’ve never heard before. I pin ‘em to Styrofoam boards putting labels below them with their names: “3:24” “4:17” “4:53” If I were still in grade school I could take them in for Show ‘N Tell and talk about the various species and wingspans.

the fire’s out again the bottle’s almost empty I’ve been cradling this fear that I may not see morning the cold counts my bones makes me well aware I have no idea what I’m trying to accomplish here.

There was a beetle on his or her back in the sand near the grass and ants were rallying ready to tear it limb from limb and leave it for dead. My initial reaction was to tap it with my toe and hope it would flip over and crawl away unscathed. Then I decided not to play god and interrupt the food chain but rather fly like a leather nightingale with typewriter red fingers away to sleep with the bees and roll with the stings.

This is how we cup our hands for decimals and shred our fence lines for animals to run and die with dignity. make mistakes huddle in the puddle eating tadpoles. Too freelance now too untamed to make sense and maim like previously. Pinch the needle fold the cuff down make mistakes let the animals leave.

“And all those pretty girls who looked like movie stars, they look pretty ordinary, 28 years old, checking out at Walmart with babies in their arms.” - John Moreland, “Your Spell” She still has her Student Council President smile, one perfect enough to walk across like an enamel bridge, but she no longer has the car she had when she rear-ended my friend. I doubt she even remembers it. She married the son of a senator and, when she realized she couldn’t be a professional volleyball player, got pregnant. Her globe of a tan belly shone in the dirty grocery store fluorescence. I pretended to care about the cover of a People Magazine, watching her shop for tortilla chips and shampoo.

Trailer smells like horse sweat and hardships. We wake up long enough to ask each other, “You fall asleep?” All of the pens in this house are damn near out of ink. Nothing in the bedroom drawer but pumpkin scented candles. I can’t write with those. Melt them down all you want, I don’t have that kind of skill. There’s a basket of seashells on the back of the toilet next to an unopened cake of Irish Spring’s new Icy Blast scent but I didn’t think it got cold enough to be icy in Ireland. I always pictured it gorgeous and green, like the word “topography” at midnight. Hedge trimmer on the sofa ceiling fan on the floor old hats that absorbed memories from old heads hanging ‘round the fireplace. Brown rodeo shin guards, faded as the ink in this pen I found on top of the refrigerator, busted and taped up with gauze-flavored bandages. The lassos make a figure 8 the only infinite anything. We caught it all on fire and the truck died over it. I waited to blow up that day. Still smells like horse sweat. Horseflies are full of blood from other things. The fatter they are, the redder your hand gets when you smash them. We could study the side effects of incompetent presidents and whittle down the days or not give a good goddamn and carve our lives into monuments. Already greater than the sum of our parts with splinters in our palms and bruised hearts. To the creatures that hide from the sun and the doctors who cheat on their final exams, the widows who never forget who won the last argument, to this Crown and Sprite, goodnight.

When god really talks, I bet he sounds like he’s talking through a city bus’ radio and speaks in code designed to stick to the basics. Reading comics instead of talking to our moms, we’ve all been disappointments at some point. There’s a grocery store with a Coinstar not four blocks away but she rolls the dusty change that’s grown like a desperate plant in an old mason jar. Keeps her hands busy when they’re not busy being folded. With skin as pale as the dead kid decal on the rear window of her Blazer, she prays to no one in particular that next year will be better with more room between the months and days to catch her breath and stretch her legs. Reading comics instead of talking to our moms, we’re all disappointments at some point.

You caught me with a phone call on the side of the road after I’d just hung up with a girl I’d called drunk. You asked what I was doing, I said, “Pissing” and I wasn’t kidding. When I was little, maybe seven years old, I shot a lizard off a fence post with a BB gun. I was sure I’d miss but I can’t remember if I wasn’t at least half-trying to keep my aim steady. At the post, seconds after firing, I found the creature on the ground, a Copperhead ball lodged in its skull. Direct. Hit. Its tail and legs still twitching, I felt remorse deeper than ever. It scraped aside any flicker of pride. I mean, it was a great shot, but seeing that helpless, harmless, dying reptile extinguished all the glory of the moment. I dug a little hole and put him in it and covered him up with dirt and wondered if lizards went to Heaven. A while later, I returned to the gravesite and, for some reason, tried to dig up my victim. Curiosity, I guess. Only I couldn’t find him. I dug around the entire cemetery and nothing. So I figured God got him and thought about his family. I think about the things I know and know there must be a reason I know them. We talked all the way home as we’ve done many times before. Nothing is consistent except for my skepticism and things don’t just glow in the dark, they glow all the time. They just need the right environment to shine like everyone.

Mission control, we’ve got nowhere to go just the same old roads and fast food restaurants. Autopilot on the day is gone night took the sun at gunpoint. 2 AM last call time to drive home and eat bread to soak up the alcohol. Christmas Day hangover headaches and pineapple ham a couch and a bed to occupy. They’re selling dead celebrities like used cars while America digests and dreams and I’ll sleep eventually blessed and warm on Tylenol.

Everything is falling into place. I look out the window in time to see a tow truck hauling a cherry red something-or-other and I might as well be staring out into the Canadian wilderness from the warmth of a log cabin I’ve inherited, with snow growing off the trees and friendly bears nowhere to be seen. The now-consumed greasy number 3 might as well have been a fresh salad, a turkey sandwich from a pic-a-nic basket I’m sharing with the kind of girl who could stop a train with her smile. The bug I can’t describe that crawled very near me a few minutes ago was simply on his way to the window to look for bears. Bugs don’t know about hibernation. I’d explain it to him but he’s gone now and not seeing bears. Her keychain said “Zero to Bitch in 3.5 seconds” and I’ll be damned if she didn’t prove it right. Ivy League teeth chomping at the bit to rear up and ruin someone’s otherwise uneventful afternoon. In short: she did and said everything she was supposed to and fell into place like a log stacked on a log, building the walls of this cabin passed down from generation to generation generation to generation.

Saw through a quarter of a punch-drunk tired eye in a sliding greasy mirror, the remnants of a young man redundant and here before. Scratch across the scab on your neck to alter the shape of your boring body. Not everything needs to be sad or clever not everything needs to be profound or thought-provoking. Some things are just beautiful. Some things are just things. And if the blood stains this shirt, it was meant to be. It was too white before. And if there’s blood on my pillow when I wake up, I was thinking too hard while I slept or losing a fight in my dream. You want to swallow this night this whole goddamn town and spit it back out in song. I want to line up empty bottles one by one and build a small scale model of the Great Wall and knock it down. Indians 0 / Cowboys 1 some things are just things.

Stellar performance, your suicide in the last three minutes of my Thursday confusing hermits for heroes who couldn’t save themselves let alone anyone else. You’ve got it all backwards, man, buying before even seeing the ads. She said her body’d been to hell and back to which I replied, “At least it came back.” A cat would be dead by now. In fact, two cats are dead now and so is a mother but not this mother. Not today. Her good leg lifts her bad leg so I can wheel her from office to office. Her good hand cradles her useless hand but she’s always on time. She hates that she’s in bed by 5:30, says, “That’s when old people go to sleep.” And she’s 50-something. A real stubborn cunt. Death must have black eyes and a cracked jaw and throbbing balls ‘cause she ain’t giving up.

The wooden head on a vast green beer. A tent for a home and leaves for toilet paper. She calls irregularly whenever she’s in town, which is once or twice a year, and it always ends with, “I’ll call you back,” and I never do. I’m sure she’s still got that guitar. She used to live on two guys’ kitchen floor. I saw her bed her fort. NO BAD NEWS ALLOWED. She wanted to keep that shit out. Not a lot of room for it between her pillow and the dog’s food bowl. But I took her to prom years ago. She wore a powder blue dress and looked like Cinderella, the kind of girl who’d grow up to be an actress and you’d see me in our prom picture on Entertainment Tonight. Only she liked trains and drugs more than she liked paying rent. She liked decorating her apartment with paint and words more than she liked vacuuming, more than she liked asking her landlord if it was cool if she covered her apartment in paint and words. The girl didn’t like structure didn’t like rules. She isn’t dead yet, I don’t know why I’m writing in the past tense. She ran over my foot with her car once and I drove off, throwing her off my car once. We were Sid and Nancy without the knife just romantic baths and fingers slammed in bedroom doors and broken glass. She might be in Hollywood now or Oregon or San Francisco. I know she always wanted to go west but I liked her best when she worked in the bakery at Walmart and hated her job but came home to me smelling like icing and making sense.

because Joey flicks cigarette butts into our backyard. Hundreds of filters later, charred and wet and rotting, not unlike my guts after a night of drinking and listening to old country songs. I figure we’re due for a cancer tree or gypsy figures to sprout out of the ground and dance around smoking and smiling lawn gnomes with a purpose asking for glasses of Dickel to shoot the shit over and discarding their own miniature cigarettes into our backyard. Shake it off, boys and girls, walk it off. Straightaways is on loud but I can still hear planes and trees and/or lawn gypsies growing and coughing up bloody coughs, blaming them on pollen and prostitutes. I sit among flames next to the devil on his cell phone making a deal or finalizing a soul but not mine, not tonight. Tonight I’m conversation. Flammable fodder sneaking by on the back of a nightcrawler. “Yo, I’ll pay you a dollar to eat that.” “No.” And the devil checks his e-mail and breathes a sigh of relief through a stuffy nose, coughs a fiery bloody cough blames it on pollen. And I can only smile at him and offer, “My mom said the pollen count’s higher than usual this year. We need some rain.” And he can only pretend I’m right, that I’m his friend he can bum lights from slow dancing with a full moon and the biggest fool this side of the state line. That’s not a freckle, son, it’s a growth. Better do something about it before they have to shave your mountains off and drain your oceans.

I was in line at an ATM when I realized I’ve developed a distant stare, not unlike that of a Vietnam veteran or a cheetah after taking down and ripping apart a gazelle or a man after shooting another man for breaking in. There’s an age and an agony behind these eyes not of hate, but a lack of anything. It’s easy to dub them “blank stares” and push them out of the way and into the street. You and I have more in common than you or I would care to admit. Dirty shirts torn jeans rebel yells from the inside out and shark-like eyes that gaze for as long as the light will allow without registering what’s in sight but think "There are bills to pay ... there is only turkey and one piece of bread at the house ... there are starving kids in other countries and in this country ... see Spot run ... " Catching a glimpse of another one of these stares is paralyzing. A mirror on a neck with a wig on that and maybe a hat. but think, “I’d rather be fishing ... I’d rather be a fish ... I’d rather be staring at the backs of my eyelids than at walls or at the back of this guy’s head ... incapable of blinking or looking away ... " Perhaps we develop these stares because deep down we’d love to be chasing gazelles and tearing them apart or bombing huts or shooting some asshole in the face for invading our space. Not exactly the creative race. All of our pin numbers are birthdates.

A newly adopted dog chained to a table leg on the patio of a place where people go for a thing called brunch, to read the paper and think about tomorrow and wear pajama pants. Let’s just call a spade a spade. This is your kennel now. These are your wardens here, dropping overcooked bacon next to your warm water bowl and into an ant bed like they’re doing you a favor. But it’s better than it was before, when you couldn’t see the dog next door and could only hear its whimper. You have a new name now. Charlie just wasn’t cutting it. And not because it reminded one of them of an abusive stepfather (his name was Jason), it just wasn’t Jareth and the first movie they watched together was Labyrinth. The morning paper blows around and eventually into my leg like a stray cat weaving in and out, begging for a read, but I don’t know where it’s been or if it’s had its shots or if anything is fixed. I doubt that it is. February sputters toward March like a hand-me-down Chevy Cavalier. Like the one I used to drive that I never thought would ever drive me here. The government’s a guitar out of tune, playing us all like the three chord song we are. And from the orchestra pit, Christ takes it all in on a date with the Devil and the best seat in the house.

Staring at the world in reverse via the mirror behind the bar. It’s the opposite of all the same shit without being the opposite. A candle flickers in a red glass before me and so it will be, weeks from now, months from now. I’m younger than I feel but I’m pretty sure she’s as bored as she looks. Our dumb beards and possibly-prescription eyeglasses make us appear like we have something to offer. But we don’t. And the joke’s on you until it’s on us on one of our last days. Bleed out, goddamn it. Bleed out.

I’ve been outsmarted before standing naked in a hallway with the bedroom door locked, after driving 40 minutes just to bathe with someone and wash the day off of me and away. New York has my girlfriend this weekend and Vermont’s got her. Someone it was easy to be lonely with and a smile the size of Texas. Three states in one stanza. Guess I always have been more cartographer than writer. Except I can’t find my way around the living room of my own mind. Keep stubbing my toes, tangled in the crossed lines of semantic networks and distracted by the scenery of memories. Gone are nights spent clinging to the ladder in a swimming pool with no clothes on, talking about monsters. And gone are CDs borrowed and never returned, favorite shirts lost between the wall and the bed, all the things you misplace when you’re preoccupied with other things. We’ve all got some of it somewhere: a new closet or box in an old attic or basking in the sun on a fold-out table at a garage sale for $0.75. It all goes somewhere. New York, Vermont, Texas, Goodwill. Now at night sometimes we speak electronically. Tonight we did briefly and she was angry. But next time I’m sure she won’t be (it all goes somewhere). I’m sure she’ll be fine and say something that makes me feel dumb or makes me feel safe, folded up in pages of yesterday. “I made your big word longer,” she said. And she had.

Where was I last Thursday at 7:15 p.m.? Took me a while to remember, but I’m pretty sure I was just about to leave the house or walking outside to my car. Sirens? I don’t recall. And I don’t remember what I had for dinner. The sign at the corner of Bumby and South reads “Help: Looking for witnesses to a motorcycle accident that happened Thurs at 7:15 p.m.” It said some other stuff too but I couldn’t make it out and I wouldn’t be any help anyhow. But someone was there someone was thrown. I’m not sure if anyone was watching, but at least two people were there: the batter and the ball. But I had not requested an invite and wasn’t on the guest list for that instant so I missed it. I was in the parking lot scalping tickets to another event. Where was I Thursday, April 22nd, at 7:15 p.m.? Not airborne over the thunderclap of metal on metal, previously straddling a motorcycle. Not driving an ambulance bending around tight turns or in the back of an ambulance keeping a gurney warm. Not wide-eyed, frozen solid to a steering wheel thinking, “Oh my god, what have I done?”

I charted two courses: one to get his book out of my truck and one back to the truck to get mine. Same course. Never mind. My boss is a part-time racist for the sake of a punchline. But the caretakers of the Well’s Built Museum aren’t laughing or reloading despite the myth. In the middle of a night that bloomed where bad dreams usually do — at the tail-end of sleep, so you have to remember every last, gory detail all day at work, even when you’re standing in front of the mirror in the Men’s Room unable to recognize who you’ve become; splicing the similarities between yourself and part-time racists and plump, jovial careerists like tiny atoms capable of catastrophes — the fan my mom gave me stood guard against stagnant air and the hair of the lawn grew. If God ever had time to donate to voiceovers, here’s where He would say, “Alison Krauss and Union Station played their sweet little hearts out to the deaf ears of a stubborn, aspiring sleeper.” On point and undistracted. Awake only to move the heavy, water-soaked clothes from the washer to the dryer. Just a 401K away from office laughs at unfunny jokes and company parties with, “Hello, my name is” stickers on my coat. Lunch dates and people who hate you out of earshot. Just a 401K away from standing in the shower too long and melting but needing the flood, as hot as you can stand it, to remind you that you’re still alive, though now your palms are pruney. The fish in this bowl have started to grow human hands exclusively to strangle themselves with. Our parents’ fuck ups are catching up to us.

House-hunting for the brawn and beautiful paddling down 7-Eleven parking lot bug rivers that have become floods and building bridges, or trying to, from me to you to Baton Rouge or Boise, Idaho only because I’ve never been and I really like potatoes. Goodbye to an era of stealing from better writers and hello to all-night diners and slithering headlights in rainstorms at 617 Princeton Street where the curb buckles around a curve and makes cars look like snakes. The weight of the water will sink our state one day, I think, and the strongest will live in towers and skyscrapers while you and I kick against the current of a much bigger bug river that has become all we can see for miles. Legs will grow weary wills will weaken and comedians will own up to every joke. Her body was exposed but her hand was under the blanket. Patton would’ve needed a tank to bypass my walls of uneasiness and disrespect. All the more reason to smile as the rain lands on my good senses and I dream of a world without fences and plenty of waterfalls plenty of pilot lights low flying aircraft at night, slicing through the thin clouds, not looking to rescue anyone, just gazing down with small town girl bewilderment.

It’s July 4th in my hometown. My mom, her boyfriend, my girlfriend, and I are waiting out the rain, which is truthfully a drizzle at best. It’s the lightning that keeps us under cover, scratching across the sky like there’s a panther on the other side — the sunny side — going mad. A couple of blocks north is the lake where the actual display happens year after year, the climax of a day full of funnel cakes, midway games, helicopter and pony rides. Tonight is no different. The townsfolk have come out in droves to congregate under the unpredictable panther and its claws, beneath a constant mist of rain or cold cat spit. Amateurs ignite their own shows all around us and, coupled with the shitty weather, make it feel kind of like a warzone. It’s amazing how patriotic people become when you give them lighters or something sparkly to look at. One night a year – even in nasty weather — hundreds stand together at the edge of this gross lake, gazing up at the same sky, and those might even be tears in some of their eyes. Or it’s rain but that doesn’t change anything. This is still a paperback mass of hope bound together with a secondhand thread of disaster. I like that. The coming together. The commons surrounded by unbeatable odds.

She has cigarette burns on the walls near her bed hundreds, maybe thousands, of them. I asked once why she didn’t use an ashtray like normal people and she said, “This is just easier.” She has a gay neighbor named Craig and a little boy who comes from somewhere, usually Wednesdays and Fridays, and sits on the bottom step out front. I asked him once who he was waiting for if he needed a ride some place he explained that sometimes he likes to not spend his lunch money on lunch and catch the ice cream man twice after school. Craig calls him Trump says he has good business sense. I think the opposite, because ice cream, good as it is, is a want. A kid with good business sense, if he’s going to hold any of his lunch money back at all, would save it, even just $0.50 a week. That’s $26 a year. That’s half of my cable bill or a decent pair of shoes. But it’s also a lot of ice cream. And Trump knows this and, really, I can’t fault him for living in the moment. That’s where kids should live. Kids and my friend, the one with the cigarette burns in the walls near her bed. She has a favorite Price is Right game (Plinko) and two or three of those small mirrors one might win at a carnival. One says Budweiser, one says Aerosmith. I can’t remember what the other one says, so maybe she only has two. Some people you lose touch with intentionally not because they ever did you wrong but because it hurts your chest to spend too much time with them. She used to be spontaneous had one of the highest GPAs in our class couldn’t date a smoker. Craig’s boyfriend, Shaun, doesn’t like cole slaw. I know this because, once while visiting my sweet little heart attack, I heard him through the wall: “Cole slaw?! You know I fuckin’ hate cole slaw. It’s so ... blech.” A few weeks later I’d gone back to see her and Shaun was outside on Craig’s half of the porch. I almost made one of those obnoxious Dad Jokes as I approached, like, “So, Craig still trying to get ya to eat some slaw?” But thought better of it and opted for the far less personal, “Hey,” instead. She used to know a lot about ‘80s movies. Probably still does, just doesn’t talk about them as much. We once argued over which director did a better job depicting his audience and, in turn, keeping his audience interested in future projects: Crowe or Hughes? She said Hughes, I said Crowe, and, in hindsight, I think we were both right. Though her Breakfast Club poster does sort of feel like a victory flag, waving in my face every time I enter enemy territory. I hadn’t seen Trump in a while and started to wonder but Craig, like a goddamned mind reader out of the blue explained that it was Summer Vacation. And all I could think was, “Bummer. Less money for ice cream.” I think I’d trade places with him anyway just to get a Summer Vacation again. She doesn’t wear a watch on purpose to make the days go faster. Although I’m beginning to think you can tell which hour you’re in by the char marks on the walls nearest her bed. I think they’re keeping track of time more slowly and painfully than any watch. But I never bring this up and smell like I’ve been in a bar all night when I leave her room. Flash forward to Fall. Trump’s back. Craig broke up with Shaun (although Shaun swears up and down it was the other way around). That may be so, but I’ve neither the time, the polygraph test, nor the interest to prove it. She tells me she’s writing a screenplay about a closet homosexual who inherits a Southern Baptist Church from his preacher father and has to stifle his queerness to oversee the congregation, even though he’s grown exponentially more flamboyant since his move to New York six months prior to his father’s death. I wanted to say, “Sounds kinda like The Birdcage,” but opted for the less critical, “Holy shit, that’s awesome.” She asks if I think Hughes would direct and does so with a coy grin just to dig up our age-old debate again. I smile back and laugh once with a quick but audible bullet of air through my nose. Dirty dishes crowd the nightstand and dot the floor like disgusting, obvious landmines. She asks if I’ve eaten and offers what’s left of some nuked ravioli still sitting in the microwave. She says, “It’s probably cold” and I wonder how fucking long it’s been in there. I almost say, “I’d love some, but I don’t think there’s a clean dish in the house” but opt for, “No, thank you.” We joke a lot but there are buttons I won’t push. Buttons that, once upon a time, triggered a young lady to start habitually extinguishing cigarettes on her bedroom walls, nearest the bed. I could say a lot of things as you have probably made a lot of assumptions but if she were to ask either of us why we weren’t saying precisely what was on our minds, I assure you, we’d be better off to reply, “It’s just easier.” I gave Trump a dollar that day thinking it might be the last day I’d come around. I told him not to spend it all in one place. I don’t think he understood the phrase. Maybe he’d never heard it before. Maybe that’s why the ice cream man got all his money. A stray cat leapt onto an old lady’s lap across the street. I watched the clouds move out of the way of the sun on the ground. We couldn’t all be race car drivers but the pit crew is just as important.

Frankly, I’m surprised this house still has walls to hold the roof up, that the whole goddamned thing hasn’t collapsed on itself that I still plug quarter after ever-loving quarter into jukeboxes to hear songs I could hear for free at home inside walls that have surpassed and undermined my expectations. I’m not surprised that nothing I’ve said has been recorded for further analysis and criticism. Not yet. He’s trying to wash his clothes while she’s in them scavenging for loose change and trying to mend torn stitches. Hunkered down at a desk with a computer on it turning a deaf ear to the questions and comments. Makes about as much sense as the President of the Coors Brewing Company swearing off drinking or R.J. Reynolds speaking out against cigarettes. Fueled by fire and booze bought with what should’ve been gas money, he staggers out into the street with no shoes on, not even the ones she said he looked so good in. No shoes and a plain white undershirt, plain with the exception of the pit stains, trying to talk so fast his tongue’s bleeding from biting it on accident. While she sleeps nestled in with a lukewarm cup of Nestle’s Quik on her nightstand and a roach she’ll never see inching its way along the headboard. Wet from sweating and the dew of a stellar southern morning, he wakes up in the yard with one hand in an ant bed and the other tucked under his body with no blood in it. Tingling. That not-so-fresh feeling like all the stars joined forces to form another sun to battle the other sun. His feet are muddy — good thing he didn’t wear those shoes! There’s a world of difference between bullfighter and rodeo clown: one is there to kill the creature, the other to save the cowboy and put smiles on the faces in the crowd. Neither was there for him last night. His hair, a greasy tangled mess of barbed wire wrapped around kids who threw caution to the wind. His heart at the bottom of a paraplegic’s golf bag next to a blind man’s old pair of reading glasses. The screen went black, then to color bars and nothing’s in focus and none of us talk.

Country stars tell jokes I’d laugh at maybe if I were five years old and single out all the good Australia has to offer. This guy’s way too pretty to be a cowboy with his scarecrow mane and silk shirt unbuttoned halfway to his waist revealing his silk chest with no scars over his hairless heart. This man has never thrown a rope this man has never fallen off a horse this man searches desperately for Band-Aids when he bleeds. Country music needs bruises apple pie at suppertime and blood on its boots not actors with half-decent voices who’ve half-perfected southern accents and bad jokes and hired guns. She asked why all my writing sounded like a sigh and never had a happy ending. I don’t know. Maybe one day it won’t and it will.

Amazingly, my reflection in the window still makes me think of Christmas in Germany and all the fallen snowflakes that died for our holiday state of mind. Someone has given a name to this postcard: Going Home Over dinner, my mother and I discussed people we knew in that speck of a hometown people who are dead now people who are dog catchers now. The small creeks are pregnant with embryonic rain and starting to dilate eager to drench the low-lying land in amniotic fluid. It is our birthright to grow too large for bellies and cribs our fathers or our mothers’ “friends” assembled themselves. It’s our right to drive far from the hospitals we bled in and bedrooms we bawled in until we slam into something. After dinner, we took a drive to the cemetery to see which Pate boy was killed. He and his girlfriend had been buried side-by-side like a country song bouncing off trees that line a gravel road (like a country song). Mom knelt to brush grass clippings, fired from a lawnmower drive-by, from their headstones. It felt like a scene from a movie with a soundtrack that might include bands like The Shins or The National or something off Beck’s Sea Change. My reflection doesn’t remind me of shit now. Never really reminded me of Christmas in Germany.

Tonight I'm going to do it for the cemetery of discarded airline headphones under salt & pepper shaker tombstones with the fine print of broken leases (of broken homes) ironed on as epitaphs. As soon as we landed, I started to miss my first car and all the crumbs that evaded little vacuums. The rust-kissed trunk full of memories. I suddenly wanted to track down whomever bought it for parts and ask him or her what his or her favorite part was. The New York cold stole my reflection in a tinted window of some four-star fiasco with ice in my beard while cliff note careerists tore along the perforated edge of Tuesday's remaining daylight like scissor-fisted soldiers on a mission to hurry. I know how this movie ends. Don't feel like sitting through it again.

A wall of records like The Hall of Presidents in between shows; silent, immobile, cold. So this is Austin? Looks about right. Like a child cramming in as much outdoor fun as he can at twilight. Where the grown-ups go when they’re terrified of growing old, and where marble unicorns above the fireplace here might very well be statues honoring the unicorns who used to run free there, in hooves hovering just above the concrete, slaloming around buildings downtown where windows look like jack-o’-lantern teeth, stabbing their single horns through the chests of every “You must be this tall to ride” sign and Bible verse and law written for the express purpose of protecting us from ourselves. Or so I assume from what I’ve been told, as I stretch out on this loveseat with little regard for the blood in my feet and imagine a therapist on a barstool, five feet away and 23 years old, with a wall of Zeppelin, Zevon, The Who, and Rush where there oughta be degrees and certificates. And he wants me to talk about me, but nothing too “extreme.” He asks things like, “Top five desert island albums?” and “Van Halen or Van Hagar?” and I’m dumbfounded but I answer and I won’t fall asleep any easier than I did the night before. But we keep at it and he cracks open a Lonestar and replies to my innermost thoughts with phrases like “Right on” before moving into really uncharted territory: “Beatles or Stones?” when it hits me: none of it has to be relevant to be therapeutic if the cure we’re trying to find is not feeling like we’re all going to die alone. And somewhere across town, a unicorn covered in tattoos slows down, shakes what’s left of the blood-soaked blazer and khakis from its forehead, curls up with a good book and settles in for the night, ready to fight another day like a child refusing to leave the outdoors behind at twilight.

Something about him always reminded me of my dad’s friend Dan, but it was strictly physical and maybe something as simple as the smile. But, as a kid, I had a thing where I’d compare my parents’ friends to stars. Mel was the mall Santa from A Christmas Story. BJ was a young Merle Haggard. And Dan was Him, but not as fast, not as manic or funny or hairy or strung-out. And Dan left when dad left, so not as familiar, since He stuck around, willing to walk a tightrope damn near upside-down, doing whatever it took for us to take the bait. From the inside pocket of a tiny coat tucked into the inside pocket of a regular coat in the innermost closet of an underground bunker the government nicknamed Inside Joke, He gave us exactly what we needed while still remaining Top Secret; one small step and light years ahead. If laughter truly does add seconds to our lives, we owe Him for years. Meanwhile, our leaders moonlight as war criminals, or vice versa, and lead us astray, and it’s never our best interest they have in mind anyway. The wrong finger’s on the trigger when, in the other hand, there isn’t a trigger at all. The wrong mouths blow on trumpets to signal a charge and, time after time, it’s a false alarm; The Fonz, fully-armed, jumping the shark, putting a bullet into the top of its head from mid-air just to say, “I told you so.” A country without cause, a tightrope for a string, our jesters should be kings. But someone has to fall so we can laugh it off and distract us from the fact that it will never be. Our jesters know all too well freedom isn’t free. It’s loaned out at high interest rates to you, and them, and me, and someone’s putting snipers in the trees. The worst possible people have paid to play the game for a chance to be in charge of things, but our jesters should be kings.

Arms crossed, head toppled right against the seatbelt, a sort of makeshift pillow that might break my clavicle and save my life. I gazed out into Texas as though it were on the other side of the glass at an aquarium and it was understood: all the fish were dead. From the long-dry riverbeds and sky lid keeping God from ever seeing what’s gone so wrong with this, I looked down, at where “down” still meant “out,” — down and out, I guess — and appeared further than I was. Still, I could see the lines in the corner of the eyes and the garden of beard being invaded by weeds of white. I was a stranger — a sailor 10 million miles from any anchor but the barnacles began to show. These roads connect the dots into constellations shaped like whatever might represent love and love lost. A train depot, maybe. A dying grandmother cradling a newborn baby. A diamond ring down a kitchen sink. Never quite sure what we’re running from, but eventually we all succumb. Like father, like son.

We don’t have to go it alone, but they will insist we wear pepper spray cologne dabbed on our necks with bullets and chokeholds so it lasts all night, through the last dance and after the last glass is raised and slammed, empty as all of this, back down on the bar. A toast! To punching in and out and back in again, to being sworn to secrecy for as long as there are eagles left. To fear! The constant comfort we can all agree on keeping us company; cameras in the red lights and stop signs and this book you’re reading. To standing your shaky ground! Through earthquakes and hurricanes, shackled in place by hollow laws. Touchdown! Where was I going with this? Doesn’t matter. I don’t have to go it alone.

A step off a ledge and she’s sinking to the bottom of a brick pool, stabbed adrenaline into her chest, hard. A tour guide by day, nights are spent betting on greyhounds named Star Party and Dionysius. And after one more afternoon of waking up in a stranger’s backseat with a racing form stuck to her thigh, she’s justified stepping over the barricades to run with the white wolves. The tourists can take all the pictures they want and zoom in on her eyes and Cheshire grin and they can bet on who will win — the wolves or the girl. Unable to agree on names, they’ll call the wolves Wolf 1, Wolf 2, etc. and call the girl Crazy Lady. There, there is your happy ending racing to the edge of whatever.