My girl walks into a river at eight, the fastness and dirtiness of boys. One half of a daffodil marriage handed back intact to the void. My disharmonies smattering out into unadulterated soft. Muddied waters. Make a little halo of her parts. Take a valentine, at once mongrel and rapturous, sticky with strangerness, back. One less plaintive satellite circling the sky at night. Closed, unclothed, a boy, soft and terrible, never any other than what I have always known, miniature minotaur of lack. Thin, then feminized amid sisters, to the naked eye a tadpole in a cracked and topless jar, a picture of distraction, a grievance set apart. Go lonely into this your portion of that, the thrill of walking at night when headlights, the failure to describe where you’re at. You and I, we fingered our dolls in anticipation of despair. We scored below chance on tests that determined our affairs. You made puppets of tamed shadows that no man could discount. A bed of freckles, the malady of star not found in sky. Mine too, the tiny logics purr. Undressing myself at twelve, a quandary, a library of empty air. Men still enter little rooms and emerge difficult, exit a plethora. You are always a little too young to understand. I tried to love the questions. It is too much to ask. Night plumbs the dumpster of my refuse heart and I succumb. Harm, it is not for you. I was the neighbor who surprised no one, news cameras and cops asking around, they say “yeah, that’s him, that sounds about right.” I will never be another. I am a dress at auction, I am a fraction, the lesser half of a bad idea. I am not without question darkness or want. I am any movie in which the girl gets killed. Two parts mutter, I sit, aswim, parolee, all aflutter, in a city of skid against skin, leaking static from my rapidly coming unstitched quim. There, last to have seen myself, I’ve said it, now I can’t fit myself back in. I wonder was I a sad boy and do you know how to know.

What remains, obscured. What struck me, what’s stuck in my head. A thousand questions and no more than a song to go on. That if unthought of even a song will rot, left bereft of light. With an AM station tuned to hush-hush, gravel underfoot. Imagine my surmise. That I have been cleft in two. Not pretty. Ever the girl in the devastated tanktop. Into it, then not. That I can’t remember a thing. Except an elliptical little ditty endlessly dissembling, distant allegiance to the voice of the mutterer who will never want for want. She was miles and miles of static and traffic. She was the longest way around. Within the empty quivers of syntax, within hours, I cannot semantic what comes of broken beauty. Another cloistered kitten smitten with condemned. Some wholly winsome, maybe swimming, some late June sun in their hair; some smolder like fire traveling the hollow walls of a tenement. Probing fungal fingers erupting from the soil, some things never change. Creeping unclean things, honest as bacterium. Only ghostlier. Our nearness when down in I. Whatever never happened next makes rent, burn it to the ground. Nothing is more real than nothing. Seasonal harm. After standard deviation, a girl like a song, a girl forsaken, fictitious, afflicted, opheliac. I was a ditchful of everything left behind.

Burned-out boy gone girl, so much in love with shiny new toys it’s unnatural. Whisper, the male ecstatic, just might never be as is, a toy spur applied to a real horse. A man by his nature must fall, a pocketful of scrawlings, open to suggestions, even the messiest anniversary is equational. The night with its thousand eyes, the day but one. Think of pictures of children, what do you see. Hurt.  Lies told so long they’ve molted into _______. The lump sum of curiosity (wouldn’t you know it) is a room full of dead cats. Want is such dread disciple to the occurrence of being awakened every day. Is that the catch? That each maiming must be missing a you that might account for what remains. Ho-hum, a gun. Or, some companionship. As if getting out of bed isn’t an epic. Now what to do with the time piling up in your otherwise empty hands. Opine wide and let spill. Pretty, I kitten the void, a picture of children burned. Better the affection of dogs, unmetered. The decisions we never get to make. My apertures riven and no soul hazards a huh. The cupidity of he spoken over she with all the personality of binary code, the marriage of plause and obfusco. Was love. Was the way of birds. Only rougher. What response to such excess. Buy your microscopic jukebox a bulletproof vest. I, fool, everyone. Come here, you. _________ is to be set free. Cohere, you.