A big party and all our kids were there? I can’t seem to hold myself holding myself. The dying matriarch, her chair at the apartment everyone takes turns sitting at now. Oceans and oceans of that stuff life is made of, painful and joyful and feverish. Her stories echo in the hallways, an oral history of their DNA. And why during this time must we still carry in the mail, mow the lawn, clean the bottle? It’s a cruel thing that time has no stop. My best friend needs to be carried outside. I’ve given him so many kisses and it’s still not enough. We’re the living, responsible for holding the weight of this collective grief. How unprepared I was. How unprepared I’ll ever be! Over there in the yard, a cluster of mushrooms like scattered bronze coins. And to think those are only the fruiting bodies. And the everything else? We really don’t know.

the best pair I’ve ever owned, bought them at the UPS store out of a moment of panicked necessity. I didn’t know how good it’d feel, the clean cut, smooth, as straight as ever. I thought us humans are meant to struggle, always getting snagged up on the microscopic debris. I feel it every morning, the hesitation to rise from my too-comfortable bed. I notice it as I pick up my pen and all words become meaningless, language obtuse. There is laundry in the dryer from last night, the duvet cover a tangled parachute in free-fall, still cold and damp as it hits the ground. I know it’s on me, objects have purpose so much as you use them as intended. Is it my overambition that leads me to fill the washer to the brim, garments large and small, dragging the net across the seafloor? I actually think it’s something different, something that has to do with time and the desperation of holding firmly onto every slippery moment. How is it possible that I feel an abundance, comfortable stealing, collecting, gathering, dry aging on the front end, assuming there will always be room to backfill later on. And then of course the syphoning, a 100-meter sprint, the realization of death and decay. On the dining room table we leave batteries, yarn, credit cards, titanium scissors, all sprawled out like a page from “I Spy.” I scan the surface and all I see is color and form. A leatherbound notebook, how the metal buttons snap into place to emphasize a sense of closure. I’ll shave my beard and say “ah, good as new!” I’ll scrape the garden bed dirt from my fingernails and toss an old salad dressing from the fridge, not quite expired. I’ve noticed silver hairs on my left-head, like a hole in clouds where the sun peeks through. I know that we all move in this direction but I can’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of tragedy thinking about loss. I talk so much about celebration because I can’t bear to consider the inevitable mourning, an essential piece missing from the set leaving the whole thing useless and incomplete. Only now am I finally learning how to love, and you’re saying one day the finch will escape into the sky never to return!? The soft bit of skin under the eye, the freckles on the nose, the morning sigh. “Live forever!” I quietly exclaim as she descends into the basement, “live forever and never leave!”

the walls more sparse, the blankness between frames wider than before. I’m always searching for this quietness, though when I find it I rush to fill the dead air with my breath. I’m feeling alive in a mossy boulder kind of way. A softness, a beating heart. Milo rises abruptly to pant and bark at the nothingness. Notifications go off, the telephone, a puzzle. Is that pollen, a wispy cotton ball floating above the power line? The swamp cooler’s cover, shredded by wind and hail, sitting in stillness, undressed. Here comes the sprinklers out front, the overgrown grass causing a mist more than a spray. Are all things in their places? A binder full of necklace charms, seashells in a mesh zipper bag. It’s okay if the glass chips, just put it in the back of the cupboard. I dreamt of this day, so unremarkable, the hum of a jetliner passing above. I dreamt of the roses, their thorns, a blood too thick to drip. I, a pair of cupped hands my body rests inside, a hammock. And the leaves only touch when the wind tells them to dance, as if to say “I love you I love you my neighbor!”

. . . I want to be quarterback. . . “One thing, just one, leads to another”. . . I want to be captain! O Captain! my Captain Crunch into the sea! “One thing, the thing itself, leads to another”. . . I want to be in charge here, barge here through the door, “who’s in charge!?!” Instead I sit back, kick up my legs and play a tragic waiting game. Like a dating game for patient bachelors with too much amygdala. “One thing leads, leads ahead of everything else, to another”. . . I want I want I want wanting to be enough! Never is, never will be. Wanting is a funny thing. I love 10:48pm, humid but breezy, a 65° that feels like a 65°, street lights and all. Got it and didn’t even have to want. “One thing leads to another”. Another being any other (any, all, or none). . . I want milk for my cereal, it’ll help me think.

my table, the air purifier humming as I bite my thumb’s nail and wonder what I even have to say. There, a dusty hairball against the floorboard I pretend not to notice. I try to ignore the pressure I put on myself too. I try to convince myself that I’m so easy going, that I don’t even care how much I don’t care. The weight and tightness in my chest, fear in the cartilage and fascia, my breath a faint whistle like the one blown by Rose at the end of the movie. There is always a spot for the dog on the bed, even when there’s not. She places herself in the crevices and negative space. My sneakers like two weathered soldiers saluting the wall, the jeans in the hamper sprawling their legs onto the rug, taking a much deserved break from the day they’ve had. I want to feel victorious, when I wake, when I sleep. I wait for the feeling but it never comes, or it does but not for long, like a flash of lightning, a flash flood only to leave the basement of my heart wet and moldy as I sop along to the next rest stop. All I want to do is rest, stop. But that’d be too easy. Victories must be won in sweat, tears, blood, etc etc you know the drill… Whenever the train blows it’s horn, Bagel runs urgently to meet her enemy. I get it, I have trouble sitting idly by as the echoes of my imagined dangers sound their horns in the distance. I, like her, will stare off into nothingness, convinced I see a shadow, a form coming to breach all my vulnerabilities. Just like her, I too can’t be soothed, convinced that the shapeless form is in fact a pile of leaves, or maybe nothing at all. We need the fear, we’ve fed it all these years and now you expect us to just let it starve? That wouldn’t be nice now would it? Wonderful is the feeling of forgetting to be afraid. Forgetting the method to the madness, letting the madness smile, misunderstood in the back of the theater. I draw the curtain to reveal a symphony who lost its sheet music and instead have decided to follow a trail of ants on the podium, leading to a single Swedish Fish under the stage, bright red as ever, sticky, jubilant, devoured, not afraid.

there was a nostalgia to the smell, Manischewitz on a Saturday morning. In the great expanse we call hosing down the back porch, there is discovery and overzealous triumph. I can’t quantify the known world, I don’t have enough hands to count on. As Milo licks the excess gardenhose water off the ground and the sound of the neighbor-children joyous on the trampoline echoes into all the yards, I retain too many uncertainties to basque in the fortunate sun. I haven’t yet figured out how to spend my days. The hours and minutes kick up and float away like attic dust. I dream a lot. Awake, asleep, it doesn’t matter, the movie doesn’t stop, no intermission or bathroom breaks, sticky popcorn littering the floor of the theater. What is one to do in this world? I can’t define “success” just as ants can’t define the pile, or a cushion its feathers. I’m not one to know with certainty any pronouncement of self. I’ll ride the tide and become beached on all the dunes. I was so sure at one point in my life, yelling in all the ears (my own the loudest), shouting about knowledge and truth, a carved stone. I’ve softened since, finding uncertainty in every crevice of existence. Unanswered questions are my lifeblood. I’ve come to appreciate this flubber-state, bouncing from one horizon to the next, waving to the crickets and skyscrapers as I pass. I have dug so many holes in this yard, to China and back and I’m still playing in the dirt. Making mud castles and rock sanctuaries, a shovel in the pit of my stomach, an arrow pointed at the sun. It’s a salamander’s heaven, a pair of eyes peeking over the fence onto the Sandlot junkyard of my heart. Every time I think I got it figured out, what I’ve really done is discovered another door opening up to an unending series of glass houses, light reflecting and refracting through the walls and corridors, a diamond earring and a whisper. If you find yourself with me maybe we can hold hands and laugh at the absurdity of it all, and ask each other all the questions we’ll never have answers to.

peeking my head out from layers of dirt, seeing light for the first time, or at least since my last life, my last birth and that whole again and again. I timidly approach the cracked-open door, a faint memory of splinters and coughing. I’ve dreamt of this place, so bright and fragrant, 4 red-faced birds playing in flight, spiraling mid-air, their song not a song but a siren. Milo is sprawled out on the lawn, letting things like gravity and the heat of the mid-day sun do their bidding. How many times have I woken up here, seeing the world as a new place, the hornet’s nest, the rock garden, the taste of my own mouth? I’ve heard there are some jellyfish that live forever, always floating and dreaming and straddling onto an old old life. When does one begin to know themself? To recognize the morning sigh, a bitter soup? Every time I get to knowing I’m struck with thorns and electricity, scraped up and fazed, struggling to remember how to remember. Every year the radishes are the first to sprout, rushing to the surface to welcome the spring. Do they remember those other years, the worms, the wet dirt? Or are they like me, confused and overwhelmed by the brightness of this world, yearning to touch every sound and taste every smell, because we’re here and we’re ready but just not sure for what.

toppling onto gingerbread island, and the Quakers have a hero in oatmeal. And we can all warn each other of menacing egotists painting their image onto every soup can. Those green foam Hulk hands trying to drink pasta water for recreation, not nourishment. “HULK SMASH!” we all say in unison. Static on the television sets, static on the radio, Freud over there asking everyone why it’s so phallic… There is a wedding ring made of tin foil, a caveman found it in a clay pot Anne Hathaway’s sister made, the hedge fund managers approved. “Costco hotdogs will always be $1.66!” the CEO says, the diamond dispenser jammed in his upper guest-loft. I’d like to congratulate the lookers for inventing eyelids and the cent-patrol for convincing us to drop our pennies. A rabid squirrel playing backgammon with the neighborhood chocolate dealer. Everyone kisses the sky and cartoon hearts appear above us, bubble sound effects as they pop. Is that grandma’s perfume I smell? There were flower pedals in my Cheerios. Tried to return the box but I was told to donate it to the cardboard castle estate across the street. We’re all fleeing something but sometimes, some things are worth staying for, or better yet planting our feet into wet cement for. The cement truck driver smiling as he drives away, knowing all wheels aren’t meant for spinning. A dragon fruit tries to convince the others of his mythical origins while kiwi knows she both looks and sounds cute! The cups are in the cupboard, the bowls in the bowling alley, the scent of all sentences. Today, the birds are happy. I wish I could name them all. And the sun, so proud of all the stories written about him. There is a stillness to this place, as we ride on the backs of palmetto bugs, wings like tiny sails.

I swear, I’m not obsessed with death, why would I avoid it it at every rooftop I visit? Nothingness is the freakiest thought I can think of, but there’s gotta be nothing to be something, right? The in-between. The large glass of orange juice, not from concentrate, that’s why they had me on all those ADD meds, I’m a pure gemini. Do you want grounded me? As in ankles submerged in the dirt, growing roots out of my toes me. Or do you want strapped to a parachute in a tornado me? Electrons not knowing or caring which space to occupy me. They taught it all wrong in the classroom me. It’s okay if you want none of them, or all of the above, it doesn’t change which snack drops from the vending machine. And then I’m all like “Walt Whitman says he contains multitudes”. What’s up with me and dead gay American poets? I guess the heart wants what the heart wants. Where does my empathy go when it hides away? When I ask and all the spectators of the soul say “I dunno, never heard of the guy?” If gaslighting one’s own self was a sport, I’m the olympian with no country. I can’t say that I’ve never started a sentence and not known where it would take me. What fun is knowing if the pen has no care for your story anyway? That’s why I like improvising, in music each note informs the next. No one taught us how to breath, to walk, to smile… it’s all improv. We were all caught on candid camera, unprepared and unexpected! We are lost in the supermarket and our only job was to grab the milk. “Cleanup on aisle 12”. 1, 2, 3, 4. . . 12 can’t be far. Maybe they can help me there, I can talk to strangers. You are not my mother. All I’m saying is that it’s okay that we’re all “failing” all the time. Momma didn’t raise no robot. We all know the clichés about failure. Something about Michael Jordan’s high school team, Javier Kaminsky sailing for the first time at 42. If we got paid to fail I’d be rich, living in a lofty jungle mansion in Peru with a guest house full of parrots and citrus. I get paid in other ways, in experience and memory and trauma and joy. The parrot room would be nice but it’s okay for things to only exist in my mind too. There is enough room in there, and then it’ll be forgotten and replaced with the next fantasy. Here I am, outside, sun hitting my chest, one dog in front, one dog at my side. The warmth of the sun against my chest reminds me of being on Gabe’s roof, shirtless, careless and free and untangled. “I am still that person” – I whisper to myself, hopefully convincingly enough.

It’s like a petting zoo for twisted surrealists. I can never write what I actually feel, always hiding behind the thick veil of abstraction. Is it my male genitalia that doesn’t allow space for feeling, for sense? I don’t know. I go to therapy and talk about stuff, but I can never let myself open up that shadowy cabinet on my own time. It’s easier to allow words to spill out, each one asking the last guy where we’re at in the story and everyone’s lost. I can’t breath man… I mean I can, I’m doing it now, but my lungs aren’t happy with me. There’s no control in this house. We all die one day anyway so what’s control matter then, now, ever? “Through the eyes of God” – takes a sip of tea and thinks of simpler times. That’s how it always goes, right? At least for me! I’m horny for the past. The future is a striptease but the past has its panties wrapped around my eyes and I can’t get enough. Okay enough… I’m not the Hustler Philosopher’s child, I’m just a nonnegotiable receipt for your records only. Let’s get back to feelings, thoughts, that’s why I bought this book in the first place right? I’m frustrated I think. I’m constantly feeling lost, then found, then lost again. I want there to be no questions except those I can answer. No sensation without a root, no puppet without its master… but maybe the puppet is in charge. Pinocchio had something going there. The world is uncertain, and that’s okay I guess, but at least give us a hint, a clue… am I on the right path? Am I on A path? Are there even paths? There are so many clichés to answer these questions that I could build a cliché skyscraper, jump off, and never find the ground. What’s all the searching for anyway? When I was a child there were no questions. I existed at the edge of the universe, expanding at the speed of light, skirting against the unknown without a care in the world. That’s not me anymore, or maybe I just forgot how to forget. It’s not like I “know too much”. I still feel clueless as ever. But the voice in my head asks unanswerable questions just so it could scoff at me as I dig under rocks searching for nonexistent truths. Today I told my therapist that I wished I was just an energy field, without sensation at all. I probably don’t actually want that, but the idea was that without sensations, nothing would trigger the anxieties associated with ‘solving’ for the source of them. Nothingness would be no fun though, I know that and who am I kidding, I’m like Frank O’Hara when it comes to loving benign existence… until I don’t I guess. We’re all like that in a way. Monet and Picasso can all be drawn in binary if the units are small enough. The infinite flow and flux of on and off make the craziness that is “in-between”. I do love life, or at least I love to love life, but these dam road blocks present themselves not as part of the hero’s journey, but as rips in the film itself as the projectionist is up there asleep in his box. I don’t think my suffering is unique or more difficult than anyone else’s. Suffering is suffering, even the off-brand stuff tastes the same. I’ve had it easy, I’ve had it real good. Sure I’ve been through my fair share of fuckery, but the foundation that built this house is sound. That’s more than a lot of people can say, and some of those same people have built mansions out of sticks and stones. I don’t have the answers, I wish I did. All I know is that the road is wet and there’s no emergency break. If I swerve for every mysterious sensation, every unanswered question mark in my head, I’m going straight off the cliff into oblivion. Slow down, grandma’s in the back with a pot of hot stew and the only sure arrival point we have is death (not to be dramatic), and no matter how vigorously we swerve around those corners, we’ll always arrive on time.