A Song

This one or the next one
she holds in
she holds it out
she's crazy about the gals
at the Madison Square Inn
this one is the next one
all of em

In memory of the little black spring chicken

We had just heard about
 the video of a tiny hummingbird held out
by human hand for its mother to feed
It could have been ruby red
though I had only heard about it
held out on the human hand to feed
and brought inside while its shoulder healed
until one day mother and human hand healed
baby flew away
my black dog can't catch a fly saw you
and we brought her in.
I watched you in the corner by the forcynthia bush
I watched your mother sit on a limb.
I caputured you in my binoculars
little black spring chicken
lumbering in short green grass
We had just heard about it
how a man healed a hummingbird
practical nonsense we tell children touching baby birds
but, we are leaving for New York in three days
It was our distaction
dogs and cat, houseplant's and  May garden
and the packing

We had just seen a video about you
and I drank my wine and we kept our dogs inside
I watched the Robins closely
and the mother slowly over head.
Black bird you were fat
the first coat of dark reflective blades had almost grew out the grey fluff
except your feet and
your beak and crown and your eyes were tucked under
your wings into your breast
My wife found you laying on your stomach
little bird you made it far
along the side of our house to the
the chicken wired downspout
.
A cat
a cat sliced your chest with four fine lines
and seeing it all didn't know what to do
The skin was bare under your armpits
only beggining
I should have buried you
so your mother could see
buried you in the Ghanges
blackbirds sing one mourning song
buried you in the trees
We had just heard about it

the hummingbird
I forgot about you
young little

Dream, an obit and one.

  I was standing on a cliff that offered no glass or wood  barrier to keep any us from slipping on the loose dirt rock down into the swell of the pacific ocean.  The ocean was blue and foamy and the sun allowed me to see the gulls a quarter of a mile out.  The guide was an old Asian man who beside collecting our tour dollars commanded a respect from his white eyes and lined face that he felt was condescending coming from us hour-long foreigner customers.
Below us, 400 hundred fields down, a group of men waded close to rocks.   They floated heavy iron caskets along the water and I knew they were transporting items of gold and jade and the compartments of Isis in them.  On the orders of another, one man bent down into the waters and scooped a hole in the seabed.  He lifted a great iron casket overhead and I saw that on the coffin plate an ancient man had been engraved.   The metal was now blue so I knew the ore was copper and it's people were homo sapians and the bone flute was an heirloom that died with the sage.
      Down at the the low tide the man held the great casket above his head and shook the bone and dust from it into the pit he had dug with his two hands on the ocean floor.
Our guide began muttering.  I was crouched below him and saw fine black barbs grow out of my fingers.  Our guide said, "I curse all  of you.  Every letter you write shall be excruciating."
The couple behind me were taking pictures of their two grandsons along the ridge.  They said, "We didn't do anything."
The guide replied,"You didn't do anything."
I looked at the short barbs coming from my fingers and was not alarmed.  Another couple, old and touristy--the man wore a blue Pearl Harbor cap and the woman a fanny pack.  He walked away towards the tour bus.  "You're crazy if you think we're responsible for that." he said. 
I walked over to him and put my barbed right hand on his shoulder "I curse you." I said.
. . .

John Metzler carved planks of wood into smooth tables that showed the fine grain of an object living.  An object living that too many of all of us are too small to see as alive when it is living or dead.  John Metzler took old trees and recycled them into art.  John Metzler used a giant power saw to carve the chunks from dead things so he could smooth and sand and varnish.  John Metzler wore hearing protection to save the cilia that youth had not already gathered.
     John Metzler stood with his back to the road feeling the vibration of the saw in his palm and groin.  His teeth chattered and foot sole shook.  A U-haul wagon dislodged from it's horn and careened towards him for 50, 100, 200 feet while John Metsler carved an old tree.  He could not hear the metal of it to his back, hopping the the curb and killing him May 13th, 2010.

. . .

this garden i planted
soil i tilled
grass i beat from dirt
will all return eventually.

One dog on the lawn two on the porch, Oh Pittsburgh, you make me cheesy.

birth to Liberty
I expose you to the unbaptized brains of pagan foreigners
to Pittsburgh, your native  burnt
if yr brigdes collasped
we would stand in this tunnel and celebrate
like the first heros of the strecthed calf skin
strained like our eyes as the sun slips smoke on your bones
like our eyes for what no camera can take home
words fall like your writers eyes into green wakes
the green stillness of your viens
if your glass buildings recidivate to sand
and fill your bowls with them
I marvel, like a rich child imagining
himself shoeless and half naked upon cities
whose hands suffered to create
trees choose to fall
and rains gather homes
I would dive from that mountain hole
risk death in the green viens
of unsolicited prophecy
to sleep beneath your fountain and look up upon that hole
gound to be taken
   cool days
    lips to listen
    hands rubbing you while our eyes look the other way.

Friday afternoon from my porch

When stars die
Pearl calls,
with yellow sticks in her throat
a sanitarium
  I was with stone.
Wished away all the life
for a nap upon a leech
the day before she was pink gone
Pearl, I shall wait,
wait for bone
mother-
belong in the coulds
I will point my finger
you go.

Arrington de Dionyso

That is right; a love song.

I think about all the things I said today
I wonder if it was alright
All the things I said

Were my words enough to sooth my girl
she needed a good cry
Did I sooth my girl

Were they truth, the feelings, did I hold back enough
Did I boast too much or linger too long

All the things I say I need them good enough for two
All the things I say make them good enough for two

Did I wake with alarm
the birdong
sirens through the window

Did the black squirell make you smile
the little child make you cry
Did I run the water too long
Did we drink all the wine
I can't remember what was said
or if it was true
as long as I said it to you and no one else

All the things I say I need them good enough for two
make them good enough for two.

Dogs---research based revision

     Chris caught me staring at his dick. We were peeing into empty apple juice jars in the shade behind our houses and his urine poured out yellow from a hairy dark dick. I pointed at the ground,  where his pee drissled about the bottle. “Its mellow yellow.” His younger brother Jimmy laughed. The most JImmy and I could muster was a pathetic clear offering from bare testicles. I was going to freeze our urine in ice cube trays and put them in my sister’s coke.


“I got a dick as hard as Superman’s elbow.” Chris said, shaking off the rest and letting it pass.

     Jimmy was cute poor kid--t-shirts too long and dirty. He had the brown eyes and cropped black hair of his kin. The two brothers were half-Mexican suburban rats who smoked cigarettes and got wet and knew how throw a punch. The day before we we’re knocking knotty crabapples into the creek behind our houses and I got pushy with Jimmy. He hit a baseball down the hill into a thick thatch growing around a thorny locust and Chris came at me when I pushed Jimmy down.

     Chris was in Jr. High and I was in grade school. I stepped back and yelled at him, holding the bat out in my arm, “Get off my property.” I called them poor and Chris jumped onto my chest and pinned my arms down. He let one go to jab me in the ribs and I scratched at his face. He had beautiful eyes. “You’re a little asshole, Scott.” I screamed at my sister to run inside and call the cops as he laughed a dusty joke from his lungs.

     We were more alike than I wanted to admit. We were like dogs. Young pups left too often alone and without training no outlet for their creative energy. Our energy was lower-class ferality like long plaqued teeth sinking into the necks of each other. Dogs like us needed a leader and in its absence our childhood turned into a play for dominance of the weaker ones.

Chris’s mother was the weakest pup of us all.

     She came over to use the phone once when I was playing sick. She had curly black hair and manicured eyebrows. Quiet, pretty, young, younger than I am now, I was attracted to her weakness. She looked down. If ever I was going to have sex with an older woman. My own mother told me this story years after her family had vanished one day.

     Several nights my mother was awoken by the screams of Chris’s mother. Her drunken boyfriend pounded and kicked at the front door and she cried “No, no, no.” Chris would get involved occasionally, “Leave her alone you fucker.” My mother laid there, her red cherry, like an antennae glowing in the dark. “If she ever screamed for help, I would’ve called the police, she never did.”

      After I poured our piss into ice cube trays I went out and saw the greyhound that followed me home the previous day. She had a squirrel up a tree. She jogged up to me with the face of a half-wit—eyes wet, panting and sniffing with her bulbous black snout. Greyhounds, like me, have a terrible sense of direction so it was fantastic that we found each other. Crossing paths on any given day was like two blind men running into each other in a park at night.

      Greyhounds have the biggest heart of all dogs. It enables them to fly after prey at 45 miles per hour. Maybe it was also that heart that came on me lost and crying on a dry sidewalk. Maybe she was sitting in her front yard and saw me and felt I was the most helpless of them all.

     Greyhounds are pack oriented dogs. They need leaders too. In a brief day she had accepted me for that role, although I knew it couldn’t last for long. I tossed a tennis ball and she flew after it.

     It was yellow day. The monarchs flittered in the milkweed around the air conditioner. Kansas sun, mostly unimpeded by shade trees, ricochets off concrete streets and sidewalks into the atmosphere, and eviscerates the blue from the sky until it turns milky and hurts the eye to even look up at it. The sky was the same color as Chris and Jimmy’s rental property.

     Around noon, a friend came over and we went over to Chris’s house with our baseball bat and gloves. A leprous sycamore tree shaded their front yard and gravel drive way killing any chance for grass. Their mom sat on the front porch drinking tea with her neck arched and arms out behind her. I suggested we play in their front yard and took off my shirt.

     The grey hound chased down the neon tennis ball and delivered them to me, sticking her long paws ahead, bowing; smiling.

     Chris hit a ball high into the street and the grey hound followed it. She sprinted off like Eadweard Muybridge's Horse in Motion—all four feet off the ground at once. They came back down not quite at the same time. Her tongue hung out like she was daydreaming.

     A Volvo doing about forty-five miles an hour in a thirty-five slammed into her long side. Its tires screeched, creating a surrogate for the empty space upon my tongue. The greyhound exploded on impact. Chris yelled, “And she’s out of here.” I recognized his laugh.

     My white shirt lay wadded in the dirt in the front yard. Chris’s mother covered her eyes. Jimmy and my friend Joel stood like open canyons towards the accident and Chris rested his chin on the end of the bat laughing not so loudly, not so enjoyably.

A Lil Sunday Morning Something sum.

One Robin will not let the other fly away
they trot, quick, tiny short,
slow
towards the cat
that should not be mistaken
for a crow
...

Bicycle pedals, whipering dogs on
in the leaves in the trees
tee-tee-tee-he-he
the red bishops cheep
thrushes chatter like smiling innocencents
who want to pet the dogs, Is he friendly...
odd gull or gooses on high
whistle babble brook
creatures so hollow they replace
one another
awaken before the dawn
the early wormers
miss us when us are gone
....

Magnolia
do not lose, pink and white graduation
fulough, an Easter sympathy card
do not lose
as long as you catch sugar and wine
in your folded hands
we will love

Public and Spoken Word

     Silent reading was first documented by the venerable Saint Augustine in Confessions. A fourth century AD Father (Of course)-- Father Ambrose entertained Augustine so much with his non-speaking that it drove him to documentation, “…his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent, his tongue was still.” What a crazy notion. Silence.  A goat-teed Ambrose, tea and cigarette, pondering, lips moving over Latin gold, finally slamming his calf-skinned novel shut extinguishing his tallow candle. But he was one of a few literates, maybe: http://thriceholy.net/literacyf.html


     Orators and public plays had always captured the varied imaginations of peasants, nobles and aristocracy alike, as they do today, until Gutenberg’s 15th century movable type press was imbued with 19th century steam power and the flooding of the masses began, with pulpy Beadle dime novels of ill and consumptious repute. Public readings of prose continued as always, in salons and coffee shops and college campuses, but it will never regain its prominence as a viable source of entertainment and information.

     That is why the readings which occurred on The University of Pittsburgh satellite location in Greensburg during the third week of March were an occasion for the celebration of spoken word. It is not an unpleasant experience to hear the sentences that many an hour have occupied in the author’s head. To hear the diction and timing of words broken from the source grants the imagery electricity. Let us not forget the act of showing up and sitting in a metal chair and how this interacts with the words, with author and audience. During Gerald Stern’s moving hour of poetry the rain poured night crawlers the size of squirrel intestines down upon the campus and a tornado siren whirred distantly. Who among the crowd would have not been ashamed to die that night during a reading of “The Dog” http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/gerald_stern/poems/18058
or singed their shoelaces during the five minute fire alarm preceding Joseph Bathanti’s scathing reading of The High Heart.

     It is down-right shame that spoken word, poem or prose, is not valued like stock in our society. That it is cornered off into small enough room. What I would pay to hear a public (and not a subscriber station- it is just not the same) radio station announce: “Coming up after the break a two-fer as John Cheever takes us swimming and Hemingway tells us about a Lion Hunt that goes all wrong. First, Laura with the hyperbole traffic report: ‘The end times are nigh, Chuck’.” Any day now, I am sure. (http://shortstoryclassics.50megs.com/cheeverswimmer.html)

     At last, it is a good thing that people continue to try. That a professor named Lori Jakiela invites us to come along on her voyage to bring culture and experience to a suburban campus. To sit still and listen. To applaud and admire. To be.

--The author borrowed history notes from the incredible Reading Matters Book by Catherine S. Ross, et. al.

Monday night.

There is a canyon between the poets who teach and those who are taught. They speak to each other—the length is not unimaginable; they encourage one another tonight,--but the depth is unavoidable. The Professors: Blevens, Voelmer, Jakiela lay on the words as you hope a poet do. Good language like darning threads. They do not disappoint. The teachers paint while the learned write poems about paintings.

I see all the poets as I want to, at any age I chose, naked, at the height of some inspired thought: It does not matter. I close my eyes so I may hear them. The professors say, “Yes, I’ve been doing some time.” The others understand the things that can be taught. Technique, contrast, what is expected. What is poetry.

I am a hardened listener. Grandmother’s poem. There is no fucking way I can understand something like that after only hearing it once, but I listen. A little blonde punk girl says “Clit” and it is one of those words which sound so right. I like the short story about the cars, by the time the dialogue is finished I forgive him the clunky beginning.

The night reminds me of seeing live shows.  The bad ones inspire as much as the goods ones do.
One last thing, young poet, like any good huckster, you should have timing: If you go over the limit with one too many poems you are exposing your hand. What is witty turns into routine and makes one think: “They’re all the same.”

For my Fallen Jayhawks

If I should fall from grace with God

Where no doctor can relieve me
If I'm buried 'neath the sod
But the angels won't receive me
Let me go, boys Let me go, boys
Let me go down in the mud
Where the rivers all run dry
This land was always ours
Was the proud land of our fathers
It belongs to us and them
Not to any of the others
Let them go, boys
Let them go down in the mud
Where the rivers all run dry
Bury me at sea
Where no murdered ghost can haunt me
If I rock upon the waves
No corpse can lie upon me
Coming up threes, boys
Let them go down in the mud
Where the rivers all run dry
If I should fall from grace with God
Where no doctor can relieve me
If I'm buried 'neath the sod
So the angels won't receive me
Let me go, boys

If my teen years had a soundtrack, this could be track six.

i still have briars in my clothes
did i lay you down in those?
the names on the stones were all erased
and i thought it was you that i had chased
driveway to driveway drunk
i don't remember this too well
glad i have the scrapes to prove
prove it was me who fell
and the names were all we knew
and the names were all erased
from stage to stage we flew
a drink in every hand
my hand on your heart had been replaced
and i thought it was you that i had chased

Step away

If someone asked me what I will do right before I die, I'd tell them, "Close the browser."

Finders keeper

The best writing is not quite like a riddle.  It doesn't spoon feed, it simply reveals.  It doesn't try to fool either, it provides.  I like languange.  I am reading Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club right now and if I could produce anything close to what she has created I would consider myself a real writer.
I choose Iggys entry.  It put me in his head sitting on a cushion.  It was true, without too much intellect--it provided details and allowed me to assign my own emotions to the situation.

birds

     Betsy opened the door of her split-level house and let us in. “Hey guys, I just put the baby down.” She has the brightest smile of the three Eastman sisters—big nordic women, the once risqué teenagers to deaf parents.
              “We wouldn’t have found the place if not for Derick.” I say, looking around inside for him, but he is not there. “Yeah he was right out front as we drove by.”

        “Nicks out back. You can see the baby if you want to?” Down the hall a little six month year old boy lays out on his back, his legs and arms outstretched like a monkey in a barrel. Darcy and I smiled at each other and watched his tiny chest move up and down on the blue comforter. Back in the living room D. told Betsy how big he was although this is the first time we have seen him.

        Nick and Betsy invited us over the night before, at a party. We were back in town for a wedding, just five months after we left. Outside on a friend’s porch, Nick said, “We have to leave, but you should stop by and smoke one.” He didn’t give me an address, only that they lived on Joliet street.
     
      Nick, Nicky I used to call him, is a good looking man. He taught me how to play guitar and for two years we spent every Thursday together writing songs and getting high. Eventually that ended and there were accusations-- some true: That I was using him as a pot connection and some not: that I treated him like he was younger than me—even though him saying it, confirmed a belief I didn’t know existed.

         We sat in the living room. D. said “Scotts has been dragging me all over Olathe, taking pictures of his old nieghborhood.”

          Betsy laughs that big wail, “Did you go to the lake?”

          We both answer, “no.”

      The glass door in the kitchen slid open and Nick’s big voice led his little girl in, “Lets see what mommy’s doing.” I saw his brown hair and felt the distance and unspoken words. “Hey guys.” He said. He hugged D. and took my hand and introduced us to his little girl, “This Scott and D.”

      He sat and the couch, little girl is on his lap, “Did you guys go to the lake?”

     After a few minutes Nick pulled a tray from under our legs and handed it to Betsy. He carried his daughter into the kitchen. I heard him pour a bowl of Fruitloops and set it on the kitchen table on the other side of the wall behind us. He whispered something and returned. D. and I hadn’t been high since we left—doctors orders—and it didn’t take much to return to that familiar feeling. Nick talked about his job—that him and Betsy were both out of work, collecting unemployment. Derick, Christy and his two kids were living in the basement—a mutually beneficial arrangement. I said, “You’ve paid for it.”

      I had quit smoking a few months before and when all of us went outside to smoke I watched Nick and Betsy pull from their cigarettes. I sat next to D. and saw a Robin in the tree behind her pulling twigs, one at a time up into a popular tree. It seemed to be doing his work meticulously, building a quiet nest. I stared down at the wooden deck and noticed it in need of a new stain and looked at D. She winked. I was finally high again, but it was undercut with sadness. I knew it was the day. Something about the wind blowing through trees always reminded me of the past.

      Nick’s little girl stood in a shadow in the kitchen, looking out at us. Betsy opened the door and asked her, “Do you want to come out with us?” The little girl didn’t answer so Betsy slid the door shut. I stared at the little girl, dressed in a purple coat, she started to cry. She’s high I should have thought, but I didn’t.
Betsy opened the door and passed her child to Nick.
      She said “Ever since she turned two, I do not know what the fuck is going on.” Nick took the girl down into the yard and pushed her around in a plastic bus. He talked loud and I feel it’s for our benefit.

      After some time had passed I took Nicks picture with his little girl in his arms, smashing his nose with a big kiss onto her smiling smooth skin and framed Betsy in front of a big green Oak Tree. I took several pics, and her smile frozen grimaced, “okay now.” I told her that this is a moment; I am capturing her in time. I promised to email her the shots and then we left.

     Out in the car I looked at D’s lap as she stretched her seatbelt across it and we’re both stoned. Her eyes are glassy and I smiled at her. She looks beautiful even though I know were both aging. This whole trip has confirmed it—we are all older now. I start the car and think of Nicky’s handsome face. I imagine putting my arms up to his shoulders and then my short hands around his neck and I start squeezing as hard as I can. “You don’t deserve this,” I think, “You don’t deserve any of this”.

love

is a glass of water in bed.

Meninism

1. Whores

Plenty of men are feminists. It can be a confusing choice: there is not alot of guidence for young men in the area and the menimist is bound to make the mistake of taking the wrong position, using the wrong vocabulary and assuming every female he sees is a feminist. (I would put the actual number at 2 women out of ten in any given room USA). The other day I was in audiance of a Creative Career panel and was one of only two men in the room--All five of the panelists and the MC were women. The other man, a young man, was definitely a confused feminist. He sat in the back of the room and could not will with his mind his eyes up from the table.
The most interesting panelist of the afternoon was an Art therapist from New York. I said a few words to her afterwards to staunch the itch from the sting that not a soul was interested in speaking to her. Eighty percent on the sign-in sheet were communication majors and after the Q and A they all lined up before the Marketing/PR speaker. The marketing panelist was the youngest of all the other creative career speekers and part of her spiel was "I didn't have alot growing up and I want alot now." Yep, the ladies just lined right up.
. . .
All marketing and adverstising people are whores--male or female--they are partaking in a souless simoniac act that does nothing--nothing to add to the enlightenment stew that so many other jobs spend their time stirring. Now, Linda and Patty, my two older sisters both work for the biggest advertising agency in the midwest. So, do I think they are whores? no. yes. What they do is whore-ish. There is nothing sexual about the word "whore" and it's too good a word to waste on a sometimes sad and menimistlly confusing prostituion. Whore is gender neutral, therefore unsexual. It is the selling, the buying and trading of lies.

2.

I was virtually raised by my two sisters and mother. My father was deeply involved in the commmunity and like most children of community parents the lessons of absence stressed civic involvement over...involvement.(Dad- I love you) I didn't learn much in the way of manerisms growing up. Most of what I learned about being a man came from the women I dated who showed me what they expected from me--being a man.
The other day, D and I were watching Barrymore's Whip it --itself a nice feminist narrative-- and I was struck with the perfect missed oppurtunity to gender-switch a classic colloquialism. In the scene where Ellen Page is being goaded into trying out roller derby, a beutifully freckeled Alia Shawkat says, "You don't have the balls". I turned to my wife and asked, "Why didn't she say 'You don't have the tits"?
I know the word balls sounds more lyrical than tits. Just saying Balls activates the fat bottom lip and playfully slaps the cheeks together--"Balls" while tits is a sharp "ta" that picks the tongue against the roof of the mouth and squirks out a quick impolite V of air. "Tits".
I am also well aware of the psychological beach that is associated with women who have undergone mastectomies and understand the implications of switching gender nouns and the abrasiveness, tactlessness--all that. I feel like a asshole for even broaching the subject. (see #1) Ask a man between testosterone treatments if the loss of his testicals is a major blow to any man's hood and he would cry, "Bollucks. Yeh."
Saying tits or balls is not classy anyway, so if you're inclined to use the term, you're not thinking of our loved ones--the cancer patients. My real point is not so somber: it is not fair to men to associate such crass languange only with men's mentionables when women in the new vulgar world use it just as freely. If you are a women, use the term, step up, own your anatomy,
"Have the tits."

3.

I have only seen one man in a Yoga exercise show and he didn't speak. His role was to demonstrate the more difficult poses. In a field dominated by women, just once, I would like to hear a female Yogi say this:
"Now, take your time through this next move. And men, if your boys get in the way, just spread your feet apart a few inches. You may find that tucking during this pose is more effective."
I would buy that video. I might even buy her cookbook.

Questionnaire

I used to be happy to answer peoples questions because questionnaires are much more impersonal than real life. Back when the cigarette companies were in full offensive mode they would send attractive girls and guys into bars to ask customer opinion in exchange for a pack or two. My solution more than once was mustard flavored smokes. Seriously. Yum. I was finally over questionnaires after I had taken the Scientology personality test that asked something like 200 fairly complex questions before I realized that one day I would die and none of this would matter. I was at a coffee shop at the time, the owner was trying to turn me on to Steely Dan (This would not be the last fan to do so). I still wonder if the point of the test was to leave an existential crack in my soul. Before I had a cell phone telemarketers would call me. I could hear the relief of getting a young person on the line and I would answer their questions and then at the end when they would try to sell me a TV guide, I would mock innocence at the notion they only really wanted to sell me something. I did this until I realized I being quite a dick for doing it and I should spend my time otherwise. Now, no one ever asks me for my opinion. At the mall the other day, a booth of market researchers completely ignored me as I walked by. I am older now, no longer part of the demographic that spends every dollar made on hip wares and too young for childrens diva barbie cereal.

Quiet

Quake

An ex-girlfriend of mine who went by the moniker, Killcreek, beat the creator of Quake, a first person shooter game, online while attending KU. She eventualy started dating the person she beat and became quite famous in the gaming world. You have to understand that back then in the nineties, woman gamers were few, so her presence was a noted big deal. I found out about this from my friend Joel, who always seems to know the whereabouts of people we went to school with, be it drawing comics for the now defunct Spin magazine or showing up on the Johnson County Police Website. One day I recieved a call from him informing me that Killcreek was in a Playboy spread entitled Girls of Gaming, or something like that. Long story short, as I proceded to masterbate to her centerfold I was stopped short. It wasn't that I felt like a pedophile, although she had skipped a grade when we were dating in the fifth grade. It was more, a feeling of corruption--a perversion of innocence. Like some how I was corrupting a moment--a feeling--like the sting of nostalgia, an era. That if I somehow defaced these childhood memories I would be crossing a threshold, some sort of event horizon that I would never be able to escape, and the surviving future would be something new and almost biblically horrible.
SEE ALSO: J GEILS BAND

Q

I picked the letter Q to be cute or coquettish. Actually, I like the way it sounds when a child says it in running down her ABC's. QRS-T. Look at it and say it, like you have just learned it. QRS. The way Q seems to stumble into RS, like a rotund woman on a downward escalator sticking her highheel into the back of the letter R, thus stumbling in S and T. Like she has some sort of grudge against R and S and T, as if she--or lets admit it, Q could very well be the drag queen of the alphabet--has watched Wheel of Fortune since its inception and has finally had enough of being ignored. Like the puking quare quack at some right wing tea party, a flaying quaker who insists his quartan is just waiting to be delivered. Like I said, I picked the letter Q to be cute or coquettish.