to be deleted.

"We have health insurance," my wife informs me. "As of last month, according to this." The whole country's in a recession thanks to half the workers being underpaid as part of some longterm strategy, the other half being dismissed while their jobs are reassigned to the third-world, and to hear CEOs at the top of their game bemoan the state of things you're surprised they're not winging themselves off skyscrapers or signing-up to fight the new war in the Middle East. But we have health insurance. Take a breath and absorb that. Watching yoga videos on Youtube was previously 80% of my coverage plan. (The other twenty was bandages and aspirin.)  "You should make a doctor's appointment," she says. "Just to let them look at your eyes and your ears. You know?"  There's a brochure that mention a website in the mailer. You go to the website and click your way through some questions and they try to find a doctor located near you. I make...

      In a recurring dream you never talk about, you model women's undergarments in front of the mirror, experiment with tones of cosmetics, brush your hair and your beard, never daring to shave it.      Afternoons at the bullfights, you feel your age, feel it going out of you. The days are unmerciful in their constant march toward completion. You reiterate the naive questions of young boys free from alcoholism, depression, the distorted math of an old man who craves recognition and fears discovery. You're an iceberg. An elephant. A titan.      A few decades later, you'd have been welcomed at the tables of  Burroughs and Mailer trading onerous theories about education and manhood, pay for several rounds of drinks to the fatherhoods that didn't transpire.      Alas, poor Hemingway, you abbreviated the plight of madness. You'd slay the old form like a champion. Plug the sad eyes of ammunition into their bores, straighten the...

It's not a coincidence that police officers are among the last in America to account for centuries of bigotry. The most repulsive pride is accompanied by legacies of authoritarian incompetence paraded as heroism and abhorrent violence. Men without manhood, women who spare themselves true conscience: Producing generation upon generation of prodgies feasting on the gruel of a merciless god without peer. How they treasure their badges and uniforms. How neatly they suck down their cowardly smiles and reassign the hate within to strange minorities they only pretend don't exist. Their children grow fat and depressed, dull-eyed in a world of growth and energy and discovery. Erectily-deficient and terribly easily provoked, they claim inalienable rights for weaponry with vague inscriptions that very few could or would produce. They pledge allegiance and cry honor while madmen slaughter innocents and children in the name of a hopeless, causeless wrath. They claim complexity where there i...

You're just the kind that in high school heard adult's warnings about getting intoxicated/stoned and scoffed. You knew why it was a lie before you knew it was racist. And the cross-eyed kids with metal hearts, clothes and breath smelling of oil, didn't put any ideas in your head where you didn't know where to find them... Yet maryjane's flowers aren't as innocent as the native salesman told you. The miniscule red veins hold juice not listed on your pocketsized table of elements. You light, suck, cough and the gift folds itself into ashes. Eight-second memories become engendered with the entirety of the universe. You don't believe in the Devil. Your reason is sharper than that. Yet you'd swear a man with wings and a tail could be discerned in the shadows beyond your porch last midnight. Everything smells like wolfblood and a sense of pale, nocturnal carnage so generic its hard to dismiss gets to working itself into your lungs and your synapses and reality...

Sunday comes on like a disheveled bear, teeth & jaw fomenting in the brisk climate. I try to read my own palm, oblivious to the rules of grammar. Self-conscious old men whose every thought seems colored with angst from an invisible source sit over their tables serving judgement to a pitible host.  A minute passes. I put the bitchy distraction out of mind and my thoughts turn to poetry...political comics...journalism...the last uncaptured serial-killer of popular notice. We're each of us lonely as fishermen, trying to write scripture for the cumulative trials of random and predictable ephemera. The girlfriends and wives and would-bes abscond in cars with men who are not us. Grandma folds her arms and points with her chin at your birthday cake. Her eyes are a mule's. She's human in a way that cannot be parodied or imitated.  Poor old Allen: to identify with his deplorable thoughts and hate people like that -- women most of all -- shuttling the grotesque from town to town ...

I wish my quiet sense of self  was just mine again. I wish I didn't have to ask for it. Ten years and more since some lecherous manchild helped with a lucky break only to obsessively stalk my every last curiosity and distribute them like comicbook trading cards. Ten years and more of people procrastinating doing the one honorable thing to correct this. I try to eat well, sleep well, take walks, avoid feeling sorry for myself: Poems, stories, notes, clarity emerges. In another life this might count as some kind of artistic achievement but here it's just enough to make things temporarily pleasant or provide a fleeting sense of joy before it's supplanted by the homogeneous faces of strangers whose reflex towards sympathy goes no farther. I accept, decompress, maintain and use up the hours until the day is gone. The lecherous manchild has his comicbook fantasies fulfilled by the malleability of the timid. And tomorrow it starts over again. 

The voice is in there from the outset of your life  but you don't really hear it until you're about maybe  eighteen-years-old.  Something between a friend and a tutor, it tells you to desire  and crave success, to be vigilante against disgrace  and perhaps to defend the defenseless.  The voice favors solid objects, drafts rules for their  correct applications, redrafts them when necessary  and when it is independently able.  And it interacts with madness although sanely rejects  madness as an ally. Instead the voice keeps separate  ledgers: one for theories, one for results.  It isn't your soul, but it isn't far-off either.  It's an amorphous continent that shrinks and grows  with conditions, with nature, hanging garments of  the day upon the arms-legs-body of you.  The ancestral companion, speaker of many languages,  library of things to be seen and things that have been witnessed,  carpenter desi...

 Common madness often insists upon some harmony that is objectively non-existent. Comparisons of behaviour, comparisons of beliefs, comparisons of inanimate objects, for that matter: the mad will drily insist upon small preservations of order where intelligent repairing or purposeful renunciation would dearly clarify the situation and all parties concerned. The mad will devolve into further & further elaborate explanations of histories and people and events, forcing the listener to be either disgusted with their logic or cajoled into desperate agreement. Poisonous leaders defile the planet that they and all of us call home in the name of some legendary birthright that seems to conspire against science and democracy and charity to the last of its ridiculous self. -- We are right to be infuriated with them, our traitorous masters. We are sane and composed to judge the adolescent and elderly deaf to whom every concession is balm for their pathetic vanity. Society is better than th...

 Thanks to multiple catalysts in the past ten- to twenty years, it seems that kindness has become somewhat overrated. Between exaggerated claims of loneliness and isolation during the Covid pandemic, Ultra-Conservatives crying for rights that have already been afforded to them or simply don't exist, and heroin and TikTok  supplanting responsible drug use and the Moon Landing, it demands no great effort to see that forgiveness and generosity are largely being treated as an inexhaustible supply of second-chances.  Accepting this now as par for the course and not some minor fluke in people who otherwise exhibit normal judgement and common sense, maybe it's time we as a society employed a few cruel and sadistic means to resolve the issues of developmental fecklessness and the shared burden it places on us as a community.  I'm neither a mathematician nor an expert in fields of statistics (or really gifted in any way besides I have a good memory and a decent work ethic) bu...

 "I tend to work in a clumsy, hurried sort of way where it's just easier to throw things and words at each other until something takes shape and the shape has an effect as you're reading it. It's why I mostly wrote poems until my mid20s. Poems are very supportive of that. You can do a similar thing with stories, improvise characters and situations as you go along, but then the hard/fixed components of a story have to be worked out too and you can't use poetic license or some other excuse to get around that, you can't just improvise, you have to provide a certain amount of structure. I'm getting better at it."  That's a pretty good answer to a pretty convoluted question. I almost want to print it out and keep a copy in my wallet.  "I've been terrible and disorganized at writing for a significantly long duration of time. So I've had a chance to adjust to it."  Being able to belch out disembodied voices doesn't seem to hurt eithe...