“Individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states before the time of their actual demise," said one psychiatrist. They "return with a profound acceptance of change."

In Piracci’s basement I get hives on my legs after scratching them indiscriminately under the influence of LSD.  The flesh on my thighs is boiling over.  For some reason I’m sitting in my underwear with a bong between my legs and isn’t until I accidentally light my hair on fire that I finally notice the incongruous lumps.  After much panic we shout upstairs to Piracci’s drunken mother for guidance.  She shouts down and tells me to rub lotion all over my legs and to keep my hands off them for at least half an hour.  Instead of handing me the lotion Piracci begins squirting it all over my legs, lap, and chest, and then falls to the floor in hysterics.  Jon and Jesse are there spraying moist yellow gobs of Cheetos from their lips in laughter.  After taking off my shirt and standing there in my underwear I begin rubbing in the lotion.  Piracci laughs so hard he begins farting, cupping his hands over his asshole.  Finally he tells us he has to shit but he’s too fucked up to climb stairs.  Taking a bucket from underneath the utility sink, he drops his pants and squats.  The stench is unbearable, so bad in fact that we begin laughing all over again.  Piracci falls off the bucket with his pants around his ankles and insists through his laughing fit that someone needs to get rid of his shit.  After much debate Jon pounds a beer and lifts the bucket off the floor.  He walks over to the utility sink and pours the shit inside.  His head is blown back from the stench.  Using a paint stirrer he begins mashing the shit into the drain as the water runs over it.  “It’s not going down,” he says, panicked.  “It’s not going down.”  Jon is the only one not laughing and Piracci farts another turd onto the floor.  Finally Jon slips into rubber gloves and begins squeezing the shit into even streaks along the base of the sink.  He turns around, his eyes bloodshot, and an encouraging smile on his face.  “Ok guys, it’s going down.  It’s going down,” he says.  “Man that was close.”

                                                  

"Finally, I suspect that it is by entering that deep place inside us where our secrets are kept that we come perhaps closer than we do anywhere else to the One who, whether we realize it or not, is of all our secrets the most telling and the most precious we have to tell."

I always wanted to be one of those writers at readings who could get up there and tell an interesting story or two before reciting a poem.  It aggravated me a great deal when I’d see a poet doing this, casually adjusting themselves into conversation mode. 

There is always an interesting anecdote like, “I wrote this after Robert Creeley put his hand on my shoulder and insisted I try the corned beef hash.” 

Following these marginal comments, the poet would hunker down and garble some gobbly gook never hesitating to invoke Pound, Williams, and Ginsberg.  If you were lucky they would mention a woman, usually Plath, never mind the contemporaries. 

But I don’t really have any good stories like that. 

Mostly I like to remember the little things: 

I’ve been looking for the perfect hat for over ten years. 

Eating Neapolitan ice cream makes me feel dangerous and copy machines make me horny. 

I like to shop for clothes that make me feel sexy, but since I fucking loathe shopping and rarely go, I don’t often feel sexy. 

Furthermore, I like pretending I’m someone new every day even though I'm a creature of habit.  Each evening I change out of my work clothes and sit at the kitchen table.  I imagine band names for an imaginary band I front.  Sometimes I even hear the sound of the audience as we step onto the stage, their voices bawling our name. 

Last night: Palmer McWilson and the Runaways.  

Tonight: Nick Musso and the Riot.  

The main manikin in question doesn't show off any more skin than those skinny framed models at Victoria's Secret: "One lady she has a problem with the one mannikin that has big breasts. It's not fair."

You get so lonely at times that it just makes sense.  You sneak home in the middle of the night with a female manikin, discarded only hours earlier behind a Macy’s on the Boulevard.  She’s the best one I’ve seen, hard body, perky breasts, even nipples if you can believe it.  I get her home, ducking in under the security light, and as for the jogger, I’m sure he didn’t see anything unusual.  She’s in pieces and I have to make two trips.  She hides her weight too well.  I drop her torso into a chair, put her legs in the bedroom, and pour two glasses of chardonnay.  She’s shy at first but loosens pretty quickly.  We talk about all the clothes and perfume she modeled before she got laid off.  All she had to do was stand there looking dynamite. 
I tell her about my day teaching freshman writing, about a student accusing me of insanity when I introduce to them a homophonic translation.  Then I tell her a joke about a legless woman on a wound swing swirling on a hard lover.  I tell her about how she makes him promise not to leave her there afterward and to help her redress.  “Most men leave me there after they come,” she says.  “They listen to me calling for my father, as their backing out.” 

In Rich's office on Tuesday he hung his head, tears welled in his eyes, and he said, "I have much sin. I know that I'm going to go to hell because of it. When I lay down to sleep or work in my garden it's all I can think about. What can I do to be saved?"

Trying to write something sexy but the only thing that comes to mind is my checking account. 

Every time I visit the bank I accidentally almost park in the handicapped spot because it’s faded and the parking lot is so small that I feel rushed. 

Once inside I unlock my phone and look for Jeffrey Lebowski under my contacts.  This is where I keep my bank number and my ATM card ID number.  A

fter filling out my ticket I stand in line. 

The size of my check always embarrasses me.  Going to the bank is worse than getting a physical.   

I look into the cameras and wonder if anyone’s looking back. 

I ogle the rude Indian teller.  I suspiciously admire the fat, embarrassingly pleasant Caucasian teller. 

I can’t help but imagine the manager naked, who dresses in flowered print dresses circa 1985, even though she’s among the ugliest women I have ever seen. 

Today there is a new teller.  She’s the one who asks first if she can help me. 

Josephine is in her late thirties and never looks me in the eye.  She wears cheap jewelry and a WWJD bracelet.  Above her right breast is a sticker inviting me to inquire about personal loans. 

She catches me looking and asks if I’m interested in knowing anything.  I tell her that I’m not interested in knowing anything else. 

It makes me remember all the numbers I’ve had to memorize over the years.

Bukowski arrived at the scene after a single motorcyclist collided with a pedestrian and then a telephone pole, killing both men. The motorcyclist was being pursued by a state trooper cruiser, according to press reports, including one by Bukowski. He was charged with disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor, "and then given a ride home by the cops," reported the Metro News.

I suppose what is so intriguing about his writing is the unpretentious pretension that crashes and curses along the page. 

Every other line drives 85 mph through storefront windows, crushes women and children under its steel belly, stopping only to intersect their hearts in thick derision. 

Every other word wraps around each other’s backs, inches together, rocking slowly, and massaging each other’s fronts all the way through. 

Each stanza is a neighbor and his water hose, and he always seems to stare out over his dahlias like he is alone in the world.  For fifteen to twenty minutes every day during summer he is alone with his thoughts, and I watch him.  I watch him pick his nose and flick it into the fanning stream of sunbleached water.  He clears his throat and brushes his free hand through his greying hair after wetting it in the spray.  When his wife pulls in the driveway he drops the hose and greets her.  Water pumps freely into the grass. 

It’s that very reason I think I hold on to all the dark nights like a wardrobe change between scenes, a tender indiscretion between a boy in stage crew and a manikin, and grandfather’s old pocket watch donated as a prop.

My ex-wife’s therapist asks me, if it wasn’t for Rebecca, would I ever consider anti-depressives.  I tell her, no, that I don't consider them.  I don't want to know that feeling, I say.  Otherwise, I want to know every feeling.  Most importantly though, I want to know that all the feelings I ever have are my own. 

This is when I begin to panic, remembering that I'm out of gin and tomorrow happens to be Sunday.

Monday when the man who lives across the street, 34-year-old Christopher Patten, came up behind him and shoved him against the door jam. "He was feeling me all over and he was saying, 'Where's your wallet? Where's your wallet?'"

When I move into the apartment my landlord Marianne tells me about the neighbors.  “They’re not good pet owners,” she says brushing her hand through the air in disgust.  “They’re also very loud.”  Marianne and her husband Tony Orlando don’t talk to their neighbors very often.  I can’t tell if it’s because they don’t get along or because they’re black.  Once I even saw Tony, who goes by Chip to avoid the reference, sitting in a lawn under the opened garage door watching the father and son struggling to carry a new couch inside.  He simply sipped his beer and flicked his cigarette.  The neighbors have a black dog and Chip and Marianne have a white dog.  Its name is Little Guy and he barks incessantly every time he sees me, not because he’s delighted to see me, but because I’m always a stranger.  The neighbor’s cocker spaniel is named Bridgett and loves to bark at her reflection in their sliding glass doors.  It makes me think about all the people I don’t want to be and all the things I don’t want to do.  It makes me think about watching myself in the window reflection after the sun’s gone down, and about how I always avoid eye contact with my reflection up to half hour after I’ve masturbated.  I can’t remember the last time I looked at my face in a puddle of water but am fairly certain I was confused and on drugs, which is interesting since last night I looked at my reflection in the toilet bowl because I’m currently still confused and on drugs.  It makes me think about when Chris and Colleen when they would get very drunk.  This was very often, and more often than not it would end in disagreement.  One night they were having an argument in the upstairs bathroom and suddenly Colleen paused and very confusedly asked, “Are you watching yourself yell at me in the mirror?”  

"You'd think there would be a wide array of films available, but, fact is, many of them are owned by the big studios or they are public domain and, therefore, lucky to find in one piece."

I make it a point to have a bath on my first night in the tub where I imagine a young woman has died.  Her beautiful brown eyes never close.  After opening all four windows in the apartment I light four candles, one on either side of the oval mirror so that when I look into it I’m not alone.  Two are burning at the foot end of the tub, one by either foot.  I light a cigarette and watch the reflections on the ceiling.  They remind me of a film I watched with Sarah on our third date.   

After eating we turn on this French horror film I hear is high tension.  We watch sister shower.  A young blond masturbates to David Bowie.  Then a dog is beaten to death with a rock.  Mother and brother are asleep.  The doorbell rings.  Father answers and is stabbed in his chest, falls backward and begins crawling upstairs.  His head is crushed between two banisters and then severed from the neck by a rolling armoire. 

By the time mother’s arm is cut off, Sarah and I are kissing and touching and we never actually see when she is beaten to death with the bloody stump.  The little boy is shot in a cornfield and we can barely keep our eyes off each other.  When sister is kidnapped my hand is between her legs and her teeth are cutting at my neck.  

"But now we face this potential of falling off a cliff. That's the biggest challenge" of his job, he says.

It was a year ago today that I began noticing the wall paper in the kitchen peeling above the cracked wooden cabinets.  Frayed strands started fawning at the doorframe to the garage slowly down toward the refrigerator.  Garnished daisies tied together in long strands began fading and dying as if an imminent winter trimmed the walls kissing the ceiling.

I moved into the apartment in April after my brother and his girlfriend were engaged and just shortly after their second barking ankle-biter chewed through my friend’s cherished copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude.  That afternoon as I was loading my car I thought I heard each generation, individually, screaming from its anus.  

The walls of the apartment are white, various nail holes in them.  Some of them belong, while others seem desperately random. 

Above the baseboards leading into the living room begin a succession of holes every four inches encompassing the entire wall in what looked like spaces the size of postcards. 

Three inches above an electrical socket in the kitchen three feet off the ground is a nail hole thick as a number two pencil and I can only imagine what it must have held, perhaps a glazed wooden stand supporting an antique lamp where the base is the coiling trunk of a crooked and slanted sycamore, the lampshade, large voluptuous branches playing an unusual game with light, and at its base, an inquisitive blond peering around the corner at the backside of a disappearing rabbit. 

Most importantly were the holes in the bathroom.  It was the kind of bathroom where you were almost certain someone had fallen and cracked their head open on the porcelain tub and bled out in two red waterfalls down either side.  The imitation tiles were still new and tearing at the corners.  Around the oval mirror beside a tawdry white cabinet are holes deliberately nailed in clusters of five, and for those I had no speculation. 

I spend most of my time in the kitchen scrubbing down the stove, the pink tiles above the sink, tiles I didn’t realize were pink until I’d been there for a week, and compulsively washing dishes because I found it therapeutic after my brother’s arrest three months earlier. 

Every night I wash dishes and stare at the pink tiles listening to Westerns on tape imagining how Gus Cavy looks when he slaps Isadora, before she’s rescued by the courageous Billy Squire. 

“The question was, would the kids get to know and understand each other?” asked May. “Would the exchange do many of the same things that a physical exchange would, without the expense and carbon footprint?”

Alice is a student in Buffalo while I am a teacher.  She is never one of my students though.  I justify the sex because I meet her at a Starbucks function, where we are both part-time employees, and figure it is open territory and our teacher-student relationship can be chalked up to coincidence.  We flirt when I order my beverage.  She is young and deceptive and has eyes, that in retrospect I know, I should have known better. 

After the meeting my manager and some other partners walk to Gallagher’s for beer to wash off the propaganda.  Alice is there watching the Sabres shit the bed yet again.  She joins us during intermission and sits next to me while we discuss Iggy Pop, Jack Spicer, and how shitty Buffalo really is.  She plays with my hand under the table and I am immediately hooked.  That night we make out on her futon in the college party house she lives in.  I look around to make sure there aren’t any of my students present. 

After she tells me she’s not going to sleep with me, she stands up shirtless in jeans her hair waving over her shoulders.  Under candlelight I say, “Stop, I want to remember this.” 

I’ve never forgotten.      

“He had a very hard life,’’ she said. “No matter what happens, I’m going to take care of my son.’’

After face-planting into a 2 x 4 on the playground during a game of chase, I wake on loose gravel, my glasses arched crookedly along my swollen eye.  When I am taken to the nurse she is performing a physical on a student and I am told to wait in a chair just outside the door.  There is nothing separating us besides a blue curtain.  Sitting there pressing an ice pack against my face and growing faint I overhear the nurse, frustrated, raising her voice, “Now David, we cannot begin your physical until you get that thing down.” 

Now, there is nothing more discomforting in adolescence than sporadic erections in public.  Whipping it behind your waistband as you walk to the board to answer a math problem, pretend it’s a handful of pencils during a dance, and placing your backpack over it as you ride the bus. 

In private they are all the rage.  But they seem to sneak steadily from one pocket to the next under extreme duress, and even as a grown man getting a physical I still worry about that standoff.  “Please don’t get a boner.  Please don’t get a boner!” 

David’s last name is Beedonebach.  He smiles like the Stay Puffed Marshmallow Man and wears nothing but skin tight jeans and Super Mario t-shirts, which fight to contain his protruding belly. 

He is the poster boy for ridicule, providing more material by the minute, and now Mrs. Wilkinson has him by the balls.

            To this day, nobody knows how that rumor started.       

"Our research shows that implantable technology has developed to the point where implants are capable of communicating, storing and manipulating data," he said. "They are essentially mini computers. This means that, like mainstream computers, they can be infected by viruses and the technology will need to keep pace with this so that implants, including medical devices, can be safely used in the future."

I open an email from my Mother.

Usually she emails me new prayers to Jesus, trying to save me from eternal damnation, each one fitted with commentary at the end saying that my prayers won’t be answered unless I forward the email to twelve people in need, which is conveniently the same number of Jesus’ apostles.

There are always discussions on politics, on whether or not Barack Obama is the anti-Christ, whether Sarah Palin is a god sent suburban princess,

There are emails providing methods to better racially profile in order to secure a safe America.  This one gives me the shits. 

I get emails about how to be a better American, which I quickly delete after seeing images of soldiers, flags, bald eagles, and Uncle Sam pointing his exhausted finger at me.

According to these emails there is disease everywhere, lettuce is consistently ridden with salmonella, and there are microscopic creatures capable of floating through air and embedding themselves in our flesh. 

Pork is God’s sorrowed puppy. 

Her cousin Julie is dying of cancer, recovering, dying, recovering and dying, and homosexuals, no matter how hard they pray, will never get into heaven.

She sends me discussions on safe sex, and reminders that there are criminals everywhere ready to steal my identity and that I need to be on guard,

But this is where I become more uncertain of gravity.

I open emails about trunk monkeys, monkeys that you apparently keep in your trunk, backseat, or inside the passenger airbag that leap out assertively at the right moment wearing bow ties, bonnets, and carrying police batons.   

I receive emailed coupons for the liquor store so together we can liquor-up every Sunday. 

I get forwards from my aunt about how my cousin is surviving in Afghanistan where he’s apparently introducing U.S. military tactics to Afghan villages. 

But one forwarded email in particular discusses a new craze in Japan.  Women everywhere are wearing skirts with prints of panties twisted around asses, that look like see-through skirts. 

Some of them look pretty good.

Some of them look like half-eaten pieces of meat.

Regardless, I’m excited to see this trend reach the states so I can willingly mistake a designer skirt for a bare and beautiful ass. 

The rules state that any fly ball deflected into the stands by a fielder is a home run. “I really didn’t feel it,” Canseco said. “I really don’t know what happened other than I was looking for the wall and the ball nicked off my glove and hit my head.”

Central Amherst Little League is where I pretend I am Ozzie Smith for the better part of a decade.  My friends and I practice every morning, afternoon, and night, and every minute thereafter having watched Sandlot. 

There is an abandoned post office with a hundred yard parking lot behind the woods behind my house.  We use the red brick wall as a catcher.  This is where Marty Patowski teaches me to fire his bee bee gun by shooting through its windows.  The doors were locked and the front windows boarded up so the only way inside was through 15’ high windows.  We talk for months about sneaking my father’s ladder out from the garage, crawling up through the broken glass to get inside and to pretend we’re robbing the post office. 

When we bat we have to look around for glass, crinkled bags and flattened cups from fast food restaurants, who’s on first, and used condoms.  One day Audra says the purple one is supposed to taste like blueberries.  

First base is three parking spaces to the right, second a pizza box, and third the tree farthest from the woods.  Home is an old hemorrhoid cushion we steal from Crazy Ables after she calls the cops and accuses Jeremy of burying cocaine underneath her flowerbed.  The full business lot behind the hedge is the homerun marker.  If you hit a car it’s a grand slam no questions asked. 

It’s also the place where Jasmine and I make out for the first time in the rain against a dumpster and then a park bench. 

Lacing up my shoes I get nervous farts, the kind that feel like razor blades and boiled broth.  My glove smells damp under the flexed and reckless leather. 

I catch everything that comes my way, every blinding fly, line drive, a even a grounder I lay out for a double play.  I’ve hit every bag for the cycle save a homerun, a single to shallow left, a bunt for a double, and a triple that is momentarily lost in a pine tree. 

In the top of the eighth I kick aside a condom resembling a banana strap on my batting gloves and take the plate.  I take a strike.  I take two balls.  On the fourth pitch the ball carries out to far left center.  I approach first in a languid jog knowing full well it’s gone. 

But as I’m rounding first I watch Katie Bell still running brashly against the risen wind, finally leaping, and dragging the ball from the shadows of the sun, falling gracefully into the hedges. 

"I've been in San Clemente for a long time. If people know me, they have tried my food," Carbonara said. "I'm really confident about my cooking." OR He admitted he was gay after leaving WWE in 2004 with the idea of using his homosexuality in a wrestling angle, although neither Vince McMahon's company nor rivals TNA would hire him in that role. "He told one friend as recently as Monday that he was having problems and was contemplating suicide."

The apartment on Homesgarth is legendary.  It has somehow managed to have been occupied by an elaborate string of friends for over ten years now.  Whenever someone moves out another acquaintance or friend fills the room.  Stories are celebrated and passed down by occupants.  Reality and myth are attached at the hip. 

Greg has been there for 8 years and is the longest standing resident in the three-bedroom apartment located behind a salon run by two women who crawled out of a trash bag.  My best friend Grits currently lives with Greg and tells me to try it out. 

I get the bedroom overlooking a cemetery, one I’ve walked through at night on occasion to listen to the chattering of the rats.  I position my word processor by the window overlooking the cemetery and write dialogue for rats. 

In a given week we drink several cases of beer and a family-sized bottle of gin and vodka (cheap).  We play Thursday-Slursday watching E.R. and Survivor, each of choosing a character, and drinking for key phrases and each time our characters appear on screen.  One night we go the extra mile and play a drinking game to Willem Defoe in The Last Temptation of Christ.  We do shots for Satan. 

The attached garage is literally a labyrinth of beer cans and liquor bottles and I’m pretty sure something is living inside it.  You can walk through it unseen but never at night. 

Greg creates a character for each of us on The Sims at his computer, where he spends most of his time, occasionally blasting us with midget porn, amputee porn, and bukkake scenes starring discontented faces of college girls and matures, while Grits and I watch WWF and record “beat downs” on Greg’s digital camera, one incident specifically involving me beating Grits over the head with an apocrypha.  And as Karma would have it, my Sims character got cancer and died. 

I’ve never seen a girl at this house. 

Consequently, I’m trying to fuck a waitress at the restaurant where I cook and get harassed by the owner’s sister, who sees me cutting too many onions on the meat slicer and begins losing her mind, not for cutting onions on the meat slicer but because I’ve cut too many.  When I ask her to tell me how many ounces to slice, she shakes her head, completely baffled at the question and tells me to use common sense.  Common sense is her answer for everything.  When she sees me cooking she tells me it’s common sense; when she sees me smoking a cigarette on the patio she whispers, “Common sense,” and when she sees me flirting with Christina she screams at the top of her lungs, her jagged index finger wagging emphatically, “Common-fucking-sense!!!” before slogging off to the bathroom with a hardboiled egg between her lips. 

Christina never comes over, even though I moved out of my parent’s attic so that I could fuck in my new apartment.  And she won’t let me fuck her in the back of her Toyota Corolla behind either bar we regularly visit because her last boyfriend knocked her up in the backseat of her old Sedan.  I get out of the car and walk back into the bar. 

It isn’t long before she stops slamming her checks on the cook’s table and flirting with me in the walk-in refrigerator again, while I hold 25 lbs. of fish under one arm and lean against the condiments, as she pours a glass of boxed chardonnay and tries not to smile.   

Nope, she was "concerned for the safety of her other customers", (most of whom, by the way, had apparently NOT arrived yet). She was afraid that Cooper was going to go mad and bite someone.

I visit a restaurant I haven’t been to in years, called Olympic. It’s a greasy spoon diner run by an enthusiastic Greek woman and a disgruntled Irishman.

We used to get a table in the smoking room and drink coffee until 2 a.m. It’s in this smoking room Keith writes a poem called Ballad of Breasts about the owner’s daughter, a voluptuous redhead covered in tattoos. I don’t remember exactly the content of the poem but remember laughing continuously throughout, choking on my laughter when I reached the last line which read, I’d cum so hard I’d fart.

Then there is the table where Shay yells at me in front of a waitress for trying to have sex with her best friend while she is on her period.

There is the one where, after standing outside waiting for the bus to Buffalo State in the wind and sleet, I walk three blocks to Olympic where I order a cup of coffee and a southwestern omelet and thaw out reading Keats.

The night waitress always looked like a cartoon character I can’t quite place, and the cook, Rich, always wears scrubs and a bandana.

I order a broccoli and cheese omelet, after years before, thinking it tasted like sweaty sock.

I sit in the same booth Billie and I shared a few years back. Billie is a pale, thin, redhead who always dresses in black. Every Friday she wears a red mini-skirt. We meet every weekend for three months to eat Indian food, drink red wine, and have sex in my parent’s attic, where I have been living since the eviction.

This is the second time I’m in love at least it feels that way after we get high. It’s the booth she tells me she’s pregnant, where we clumsily dig through a slice of peanut butter pie and steadily drink hot chocolate. It’s the same booth I tell her I wish she weren’t pregnant before getting up and going to the bathroom.

"There's a huge user demand to not only filter spam day-by-day but to do something more," he said "Before now users have never had the chance to be a bit more offensive."

My screensaver is a narrow dirt road dashed with autumn leaves, caped in the arms of several decaying maples. There are short cobblestone walls no taller than children dividing the road from the countryside. A pair of mostly eroded steps gesture upward into the woods beyond my peripheral. Against the most abrupt maple is a wheel barrow leaning horizontally over a pile of leaves as if having been turned upright and wearily left for another. You can tell it is sunrise by the way it opens over the cracked and slanted panels of the old Willoughby storm shed at road’s end. A three-legged Dalmatian named Bailey scampers across the path of Uncle Jesse and up toward the cocked door. He whistles John Wesley Harding and flicks a cigarette into a patch of dead leaves that now seem spray painted to season. Jesse knocks on the door while pushing it slowly aside, wiping his face with a dusty handkerchief as he steps into shadow. “Precious,” he says, approaching the far left corner. “Precious Darling,” he says again, eyes adjusting to darkness. The decomposing body of a twelve-year-old boy lay wrapped in towels up to his chin, most of his hair plucked brashly from his scalp, his eyes closed and damaged. Uncle Jesse inhales deeply into his handkerchief, his body collapsing against shed walls.  The door abruptly opens. A young robin shrills from the contact of wall and door, falls from its nest, and dies.  In the doorframe, completely eclipsed by the smell of rot and season, is the silhouette of a young woman hair tightly wound in a bun skirt firmly fastened with thick buckle, and a shovel, its head still wrapped in plastic.

Things rapidly became personal. Lewis shot back in the press: “Catweazel lookalike Michael Horovitz fills me with an extraordinary lack of enthusiasm. I don’t think his brand of stupidness is harmless or charming? He is the biggest bore unhung. Let’s hope he croaks by swallowing his kazoo.” (A reference to Horovitz’s “Anglosaxophone” which he likes to play at poetry recitals.)

Barely graduating high school I tell my parents I don’t want to go to college. I tell them I want to write poetry and that I don’t need college to write poetry. I’m reading Charles Bukowski and thinking that anything is possible, even nothing. I have read the French and I have read the English. My mother begs me to take a couple classes at Erie Community College, and since my aunt teaches there I am able to get a creative writing class only offered to second year students. At 9:25 on a Tuesday morning a woman, short, plump and old hobbles into the classroom in elastic waist corduroy pants, a sweater and the largest bifocals I have ever seen. She stands there at the desk telling us about how when she was a child her parents thought she was retarded, until they discovered she was deaf with an IQ of 151. I look at her. Then I look at the clock. It is 9:28 a.m. Then she looks at us and says, “What is poetry?” A guy in the back shouts, “a waste of time”. A young girl in tiger print spandex says, “An expression of beauty”. Nobody else answers. Miss Erbes drags her handle bag from the floor and empties it onto her desk. I’ve never seen a teacher empty her handbag so frivolously. In fact that semester I have a teacher who opens a philosophy class by telling us that “you don’t take a metallurgy course without knowing a good god damn about metallurgy”.and a Nutrition teacher who talks about nothing but her ex-husband.  This is my introduction to college.  Every thirty seconds Erbes lifts something new from the pile and begins reading it: Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be, there will be an answer let it be; Thinking of skipping breakfast? Consider the benefits you’re missing; Let us go then, you and I when the evening is spread out against the sky; I’m glad you shopped here today—Your Cashier – Justin; When will I rub my come on your tits, tug at the hair of your snatch; Payments received by ISL for this loan(s) on or after the date of transfer will be forwarded to Vista for a period of 60 days; Un soir, j’ai assis la Beaute fur mes genoux; When using this product, avoid contact with eyes. In case of contact, flush eyes with water. After she finishes she drops the anti-bacterial soap onto the desk with the other disheveled objects and asks again, “What is poetry?”, throwing her hands in the air, resembling a scarecrow with pumpkin head.

He's opening up a taco cart in Portland, Oregon! (And yes, the Mercury people already made the obligatory "these tacos will change your life" joke.) A publicist has confirmed that the report is true.

One day I follow Piracci to a girl’s house near the park. Her name is Jasmine. Her father reminds me of Bob Dylan but talks like Robert Deniro. She sits on Piracci's lap by the front door and they talk while I look out for her father. Piracci tries to kiss her and she turns her head. I notice that her hair is aqua and she’s wearing black lipstick and knee-high rainbow-colored socks.


When we leave I tell him she’s never going to put out and tell him not to waste his time. He snickers.

The next week he is dating a girl who wears high heels and smokes more than he does.

Months later we all go to a party. A young blond is there laughing with other young blonds. She has blue eyes and a petite build and I think for the first and the last time that I’ve found someone like my mother, whom my father has always insisted I find. Jasmine is there and she’s throwing a fit. Someone overhears that she’s bipolar, and we all pretend to know what it means by shaking our heads.

It’s late April and like most stoned teenagers we walk around trying to break stuff, trying to break into stuff, taking more drugs, imagining what life will be like when we’re The Beatles, eating cockroach tacos at Ziggy’s and trying to be cool enough for girls while pretending we don’t care.

On the playground at St. Joe’s Keith roles a blunt, and we all smoke and everyone is there: Piracci, Keith, Anastasia, Jasmine, Ben, Jesse, Hirsch, Victor, and me. After about a half hour Hirsch thinks he sees cops on bikes and we all bolt to different corners of the schoolyard.

Jasmine and I run off to the far side of the playground underneath a pine tree with heavy branches. We have been dating for five weeks. We kiss and she undoes my belt buckle. She pulls it out and then lowers her head. I cum almost instantly, but because this is her first experience with this too, Jasmine pulls her mouth off halfway through my stream and I coat her blouse and skirt. I apologize. She says it will come out. The bikers ride by and are they are two middle-aged men with wristbands, headbands, and radio headsets.

"She wears little eye-patch underwear," said Duvall, who is married with two children. "So, the other day she came here with her underwear, Thursday. And so, we had made love Wednesday--a lot! And so she'll, she's all, 'I am going up and down the stairs, and you're dripping out of me!' So messy!" ***OR*** Along with a whupping stick and ripped abs, he's got a philosophy degree from NYU! So in between turning out-of-line drunken dirtbags into bloody hamburger meat, Swayze fires off such pearly bons mots as ''Nobody ever wins a fight'' and ''Be nice...until it's time to not be nice.''

The first and only time I go to Outback Steakhouse, Rebecca and I have an argument in the backseat of her father’s car about whether or not we should be together, while her father sits up front listening to Chopin. After arguing in the parking lot for fifteen minutes we join her father, her mother, and two of her sisters inside. Her youngest sister is 17 going on 12 and still requests a children’s menu. Her father points to the menu flirting with the waitress not unlike a clown would to a child, bending a balloon into a balustrade. They have ordered a round of sodas and a gigantic fried onion, whereupon arrival everyone holds hands saying grace aloud in the restaurant, all but me. Their eyes are closed and mine are open and I can see other patrons wondering what we’re doing. I’m wondering what we’re doing. While they’re thanking god for the food I’m thinking about the movie Roadhouse, starring Patrick Swayze. I think about how Swayze didn’t want any anesthetic before getting nine staples in his side. I think about how Swayze kicked everyone’s ass and did tai chi every morning at sunrise. I think about how Swayze seduced the prominent blond doctor who staples his side. I think about the end of the movie where Swayze tears out the jugular of his nemesis, and wonder why he doesn’t go to prison. Furthermore, I think about how AMC always fuzzes out the breasts. One scene in particular involves Patrick Swayze staring out into the night from his barn loft. Across the pond is a pool party in Wesley’s backyard. When you watch this on AMC it is always a blur of different colored bathing suits, splashing water, and fuzzed out breasts. When the family finishes their prayer they all tear into the fried onion dowsing it in ketchup and ranch dressing. They talk about choir practice. They talk about how much they hate George Bush. They talk about pain meds and anti-depressants. They ask me about my day. I tell them about Anne Waldman parading through the Performing Arts Center in an elaborate gown, scarves, and a mask. Cara smiles and makes a joke and the family laughs. Christina begs for me to help her with her children’s menu crossword puzzle. Jane twists her wedding ring and impolitely asks the waitress for more lemon. Then Rebecca pulls my hand from my perspiring cola and buries it between her legs and says, “I’ll fuck you tonight if you’ll promise to marry me."

But alone with her, he showed a softer, romantic side, Nicole said. "Me and him were sitting in the car, the windows were getting foggy. And he wrote with his finger on the window, 'Will you go out with me?' And it was just sweet, and so I said, 'Yeah.'"

Rebecca is the assistant manager at the coffee shop where I work while I’m attending graduate school. There are rumors going around about her age, and for some reason it’s highly confidential. She has long brown hair that she always wears balled up into a baseball cap, and a birthmark down her right cheek that she refers to as a Coke stain. Her shirts are always low cut exposing her small breasts when she bends over. I know from the sight of her neck from behind, the few strands of hair loose from her cap, that I want to marry her. She is confident and authoritative and I look forward to her telling me what to do. She does charity events on the weekend and sings for her church, rocking out for Jesus. When she stands on the step ladder to reach the top shelf I see her thong rise over the waist of her jeans. I imagine being the thin fabric raised over her hip. Regardless of my indefinite certainty, every word she speaks to me discourages my pursuit. At a work-related dinner party I try to kiss her and she backs into the fridge with both hands out in front of her. When I flirt with her at work she tells me to clean the bathrooms. She tells me about her dates, when she has them, how they all try to kiss her, and she always turns her head. When she comes to my apartment she sits on the other side of the room and we talk about poetry, of which she doesn’t understand, and we talk about the bible, of which I don’t understand. She invites me to a New Year’s Eve dinner at the house of lesbian friends of the family. That night she falls asleep next to me wearing a blanket sleeper. The next day she tells me a story about a dance in junior high, where a young boy walked across the room and asked her dance. I tell her a story about how I drove 1500 miles to ask her to dance. She tells me it’s not the same. That afternoon we watch Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina, laying on my futon. I kiss her left cheek, then her right cheek. Then I kiss her lips very slowly, very softly.  She tastes like strawberry. She tells me that this all I’m going to get, and then she roles on top of me straddling my waist, before grinding her vagina into my thigh.

"It was terrible," said Rouse. "It was bad for me anyway -- I don't think it was all that great for him -- but for me it was very uncomfortable, especially since I was so angry."

I always imagine a good kiss to be something like crawling out of loose dirt after being buried alive. Angela runs her hand along my inner thigh as I talk to Bator, bearded and sweaty in the dish pit. “Stop slamming bus pans” he says with a lisp. Angela tells me to come out to her car during my thirty minute break so she can give me something. When I get out there she leans in through the open window of her rusted Camry and pulls out a folded piece of paper. Close your eyes, she says. I close my eyes. She hands me the paper and I unfold it. It’s a placemat colored in dull yellow, blue, and red crayon. “When the batteries begin dying in a hand clock it begins making its own time.” Larry shouts from the side door for me to get my ass back on the floor. He lights a cigarette and stares at us, waiting.

“The more liberal stories that were buried the better chance conservative stories have to get to the front page. I’ll continue to bury their submissions until they change their ways and become conservatives.” -phoenixtx (aka vrayz)

I’m watching movies now that my parents wouldn’t let me watch when I was a child. My mother would always make me close my eyes during sex scenes, while my father would finally remember halfway through a bloody massacre to cover my eyes. I watch Shattered starring Tom Berringer. After a car crash down cliff side and extensive plastic surgery Berringer fucks his wife to The Moody Blues and the camera flashes from bed sheets twisting at dusk, to waves crashing against rocks at a beach at dusk. I watch re-watch Hellraiser and fall asleep in the middle. I find Silence of the Lambs brilliant, terrifying, and hilarious, particularly when Biggs throws a wad at Jodi Foster, and when Buffalo Bill yells at the girl in the well to, “Put the fucking lotion in the basket.” I watch Cocktail starring Tom Cruise and Elizabeth Shue and watch him throw bottles over his shoulders and behind his back. He discovers love with Shue and realizes he must love himself before he can love her. She’s secretly rich. They fuck. He opens a bar and they have a child. I re-watch Predator and remember being particularly fond of Jesse Ventura claiming the helicopter to be full of “slack-jawed faggots” and that by chewing tobacco you would become a “sexual tyrannosaurus” just like him. I watch 9 ½ weeks and am vaguely disturbed and aroused. I watch The Garbage Pail Kids movie and am vaguely disturbed and aroused. I think about Babbling Brooke splattered with ketchup and mustard going down on Cole Gate as he jerks his tongue to paste the bristles of his toothbrush. I think about Potty Scotty and Art Apart, Itchy Richie and the lovable Adam Bomb. I look at Boney Tony and Alien Ian and I think, this is my first experience with experimental poetry.

This crude live-action takeoff on the Cabbage Patch phenomenon ought to have had star Anthony Newley humming 'Stop the Movie, I Want to Get Off.'

I learn to masturbate during a sleepover with Jaime. We’re lying in our sleeping bags and he tells me to rub mine. I do it and it feels peculiar reminding me of tying a balloon knot or climbing higher than I ever have before. It’s swollen and very warm. Small sticky raindrops appear over purple lips. They taste salty sweet. In a moment of profound embarrassment, I convulse in the plaid, red bag soaking the inside with what I worry is piss.

"DeBoard met the victim, who is under 16 years old, through acquaintances and had inappropriate contact with her over the summer," Detective Matt Kiebles said.

My buddy tells me that, at Rebecca's wedding shower, his wife gives her two books on enhancing oral sex. She holds them up and laughs and says, well, I don’t need this one anymore, and throws the penis book on the floor. When she leaves she keeps a close eye on the vibrator, and the candy nipple pasties.


When I see her in her wedding dress I consider leaping into the creek and running off through the thick hayseed.

We’re married and we do the normal things.

We drink too much and smoke too much pot and I no longer romance her and she’s no longer interested. She fucks like she is doing me a favor. It isn’t a very good favor.  We talk about nothing but our days at work = we become soundboards for daily aggressions.

She tells me about the computer repair man at work who flirts with her.

She never wears her ring because it got crystallized in candle wax and she never cleaned it, and she doesn’t tell the computer repair man she is married.

I begin writing stories about kidnappings and murders.

One story follows a man through his morning routine, where he prepares for work, showers, eats breakfast, takes the long drive in. He sits down at his desk and his secretary brings him a cup of coffee and then leaves. He locks the door behind her. Then he walks to his closet taking off his coat and tossing it on his swivel chair.

He opens the door revealing a teenage girl bound with electrical tape around her ankles and wrists. There is a handkerchief stuffed into her mouth and tape over her mouth and eyes. She is covered in sweat and bruises and as the flash of air from the opening door cuts at her unwashed flesh she shakes, and nervous tufts of air burst fitfully from her nostrils.

“I’ve said, ‘OK, I hope somebody will manifest,’ but nobody has,” Dawn Julian said. “I’m convinced, probably because I want to be, that it’s a woman playing tricks because I call the building an Old Dame.”

The night before Father’s Day I ingest two jelly tabs and smoke an eighth of weed. Jelly tabs are apparently derivatives of heroin. Before this I regularly consume LSD, pot, booze, cigarettes, Robitussin when things fall through, pills, hash and snuff.


I turn 19 and my roommate scores jellies. We close our eyes and that was it. The overhead lights in Wilson Farms are an exaggeration, Twinkies are eternity, and the cashier Lamar cashes us out without making eye contact, one head phone blushes his ear and the other, angles directly against the customer. We walk proudly along street shoulders, arms pretending falcons. Tony is there, this big fucking tank of dumb flesh, slightly too intelligent for use. Gordon is there after twenty years of carrying fat and he has decided to get in shape carrying five pounds in each hand wherever we go.

We go to the movies that night and watch Clerks in the old Amherst theater where they wear old timey film house attire. I get Reese’s Pieces and sit in the middle back. Dante is trying too hard.

That night I sleep one inch above my sheets with my eyes open. I go the bathroom several times because I think I have to shit but I realize it’s an itch that begins in my asshole and turns inward so that I want to scratch my liver with a wooden spoon.

That morning is Father’s Day. Jasmine and I break up over the telephone. We both cry because we don’t know what else to say.

That night I go to my parent’s house and my father cooks steak and drinks scotch. My mother yells, “Steven” in a pleasingly embarrassed authoritative tone when he walks up behind her doing the dishes and rattles her breasts from behind, while my brother’s and I clear the table.

"I've gone out on dates with girls and said to them, 'Well, I've done two Ironmans'," said Polden. " ... They don't even have a clue. And then when you explain it to them, they ... say, 'All in one day?' And Kelly can appreciate that.

Well, here goes. I’m 31 years old. Always wanted to say years young but it just sounds funny. So, that being said, I’m 31 years old. I’m a poet and attempted novelist teaching writing at a local college. Because I’m an adjunct I also sling lattes at Starbucks. I could go into greater detail, but this is supposed to be a profile, a snapshot. I was married for eight months to a devout Christian woman who denounced god. Been divorced for two years; people keep telling me it’s nice to see me again, like I’ve been gone away in the mountains or something. Sometimes I say, it’s nice to be back.

This pub and restaurant has a really good vibe to it. The servers are friendly (see "Crush" on my profile) and the food is pretty tasty. Their music system needs to be upgraded (speakers are all treble) but if you look around, people are laughing, having a good time, and smiling. It's a great place to grab a beer, meal, and "kick it" with your peeps.

After we sign the papers I can’t even look her in the eye. It looks like her hairline is receding. I walk with her until we fork. She says she’s meeting her family at Southern Sun for burgers and beer. I tell her that I miss her, that I miss burgers and beer and playing trivia with her embarrassingly intelligent father (whom my friends have nicknamed giggle-fits) in the waiting area. You can’t talk to me like that anymore. You’re not the one I go to anymore. You can’t talk to me like that anymore.

"We're hoping that somebody saw something; somebody knows somebody that was driving along there that can tell them about this, and we just need that one phone call or that one e-mail or that one person to come in and see us and give us a little piece of information," Roberts said.

I move to Boulder, CO to start graduate work at Naropa University. Alyssa comes with me. She’s unusually close with her mother and talks to herself and cries for most of the day and night. She was Keith’s girlfriend for three years. He still claims he made her cum so hard she passed out and fell off the bed.


She gets a job at a bagel place, someplace where it’s terribly obvious that she doesn’t belong. When she comes home she knits these dramatic shawls that remind me of homeless people.

I spend most of my time smoking dope my brother slipped into my bag, dope I didn’t know I had until I was in Nebraska. When I go grocery shopping I blast Radiohead on my headphones and I only shop at night, high, after crying. I go shopping almost every night.

On the drive out we stay at a Howard Johnson’s. There’s only one bed and I really think we’re going to do it. We drive the rest of the way with my leg shaking and her head staring out the window. In our studio loft apartment we both sleep on a deflating air mattress. One night the tips of my fingers crawl along her thigh and I rest my chin on her elbow. She smells of coconut and vanilla and her skin feels like butter. She rolls over and then whispers. You must be very lonely.

The next night I make chicken flavored Ramen noodles with half a green pepper and spend $18 on a bottle of Gordon’s Gin. I like sucking up the noodles with chopsticks and pretending they’re nourishing. I get high and eat my food and drink one third of my gin.

Alyssa climbs down from the loft. She turns on the stove and heats up water before crunching up a pouch of oriental flavored Ramen noodles. She sets the crinkled pouch on the counter, walks into the bathroom and closes the door. When she comes out most of her water has evaporated.

I write twelve pages of poetry and fall asleep on the toilet for forty-five minutes with my pants around my ankles and no shit in the toilet. Alyssa wakes me and then closes the door behind her. That night I am too drunk to climb the ladder to the loft.

States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement "I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage," bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement "AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual behaviour."

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