The lady one floor above me had long conversations with guys tucked away in her teeth, the CIA spy boys or Pentagon gongos, or some kind of cloak-and-dagger megillahs that don't have a name but suck up whole budgets for wars that don't make the news until later.

They told her they're coming to take her away and put her in space, to a place called the planet Xarandax; part of the war against terror, they said, a good chunk of which is lightening the tax load at home…

It was One Million BC, a Saturday night as it happened,  and Bork, Bubba, Barney, and Fred sat shivering around a sputtering fire; stiff winds whistled right through the cave they were in, rain blew in with it, the place was skank to begin with--bear shit for days--and they were a long way from home.

It had been one fucked-up day: they'd gone on the hunt and couldn't even bring down a dik-dik, and then finally they did and a troop of baboons came pimping on by and…

Some mamas would have their babies stay babies, especially boy children, the next set of dicks in the world, who learn soon enough to spit like their daddies.

My mother came to my bed in a dream; I was three. She started in eating my feet and then up she came, chewing through muscle and tendon and bone, and then at my guts she looked up at me and grinned like a Gorgon and kept right on coming. 

Later I took my food in the alleys and learned above all the value of shadows and…

Walking in rain, I come to a gingerbread gift shop, the proverbial one in a village of dreams, that summons the children to wish and to plot and to envy like burghers of old.

Inside, cornucopias: cookies and cakes, the latter three-tiered, with groom and bride blushing on icing on top.

Bone knives awaken in boys the impulse to murder; rag dolls in cribs whose lives are a sigh take girls by the throat...

I stare and stare down the years and hear a nun rapping for order, a…