Eclectic compromise, she says, is the mainstay of routine. She says, There are things that do not tailor to the facts, and that, she
says, is what makes the abundance of
arbitrary facts, in fact, fact. If
you tell me you want to make love to me, she says, I might want to make love to me too. And that’s too desperate to imagine. She says, I get frustrating only to be looking at the left hadn of the screen and
somehow always reading the wrong right on the left hand of the scree. She
said there has to be a better way for us
to accumulate our ideas or actions about ideas enough to make a simple act of
finding a new pen with ink even easier to do than to draw, she says. She
says The color in your bed makes me
queasy, and leaves it at that until brunch time.
What is the function of forgetting? she asks. What are the worthy brothers of a low enough function to keep things
working, but rank enough to stink up the house at night? Are there any
alternatives that we can stuff in our pockets that wont make our hands bleed
dry when we have nowhere else to put them? She says I think there is a real reason, something that makes sense most to me,
and that is pure expulsion: of fluids,
and feces, ideas that can only roll back up and over to the other two. There is
love, which by any standard measure seems more like shit pretending to be ideas
pretending to be fluid. She says I
think about the low and the nuts and the beach of it and it all spreads out,
all of it. She says, I want a body to
be a wall and not a whale, even though a whale is something that lives.
She says
she likes fives and dimes but not pennies or nickels.
She says, I once won a pony race and the ribbon I got
ripped and so I didn’t win anything.
She says, Things almost seem the most nightmarish
right when it’s almost night.
She says
she hasn’t been to Baltimore.
I haven’t been to Baltimore.
She says, I have never gone into this house alone, and
yet I know the sheets, soft like milk but a little bit sticky like honey, and
reach my legs deep against them and do I can to keep from coming. The weather
is a few moments, leading, she says. She
says, The room with the bath red light on
always frightened me, always mocked me, until I took a shower. I knocked on the door and seldom saw who you
brought to stay in the bed next to mine but would hear her whistling and
wondering each time you went to the bathroom. You always returned smelling nice and a little bit sinister, she
said. A memory of six o’clock breakfasts
and you breaking them. You would down
your words as an expression of sympathy and I would sip my coffee and say how
stupid I was I couldn’t do the crossword puzzle, she said.
Am I to opine about the inherent
genders of various umbrellas? she says. Am I to
allow myself the idea that cheap, twisted bars and wires that litter the
streets turned inside out are somehow feminine, while the long thick sturdy
bands of the powerful barrel through the world, nature the least of his
worries? She says, I once was given
offer to stand under one of these magnificent tentpoles, and the gentleman
holding it fondled my breast for a minute before I got wet. She says, The walk home did little to entice me
towards shelter; in fact it swore against such a bargain, and once home, still
dripping, I drank as much water as I could hold before laying down and wetting
the couch.
She says
she ate this morning and isn’t hungry.
She says, I have a heart condition that requires pills
in the morning.
She says
she takes the pills in the morning.
I believe
her, though I wonder what pills she is speaking of.
I like to sleep when I’m not dancing, she says. Wanna dance?
You live like you’re in Paris and
yet you’re dried like in Spain, she says. I’ve
retained a fixed image of memory and it’s so staunch squirrels cannot break it.
She says, Under most situations, I prefer
to to take the larger number that is in front of the zeroes. So, for instance,
I’d take $50 over $100 any day, since five is greater than one. She says, Guys like playing with numbers, so I play
guys like numbers and there’s no number greater than zero. I treat a handshake like a malted and think
of my grandmother every time I meet a new man. She says, what makes you think you know more about
death than I do?
I say I don’t and shut the door, only really hearing her cry once I hit the second floor.
