Blacking out knotted in christmas tree lights and plastic tinsel this long past New Year's is just tacky. It's a new year. You should be passing out in alleys. You don't see our lights up in January, and the last time someone in our house staggered over a tree it was last week when I threw it out. I woke up smelling like trash and egg nog with sap on my hands and face. It's called common decency.

I am a man, and it is my opinion that I have seen first-hand that male sexuality has taken some blows in recent decades, but none so misfortunate as what has happened to cunnilingus. Some of these are completely necessary, like owning up to carrying diseases with a willfully ignorant impunity, or better, immunity, as these diseases in question do not affect men's health directly. Some of these blows are justified, like the spotlight on studliness's  increasely common confinement to mockery…

I have just seen, for the second time mind ye, a sticker of Calvin, comic strip hero and existential space explorer extraordinaire, urinating. . . and only him urinating. . . and let me just spoil the surprise of what follows by saying that this is bafflingly awful. It's just him letting it run; not on an auto manufacturer, not on a political party, not on a sports logo, and not even on a map of Europe, as if any of those are justified at…

If there is rest for the dead, we don't know it at all. Sure, death looks peaceful but what do we know of loose souls and the pace of an afterlife? One cannot wait on sleep for the dead. There is virtue in stillness because what is it if not the obelus of free will? Take it easy until it's taken away. Look good dying and do it on your own time.

And what do you suppose Brian Benben dreams about? His fame for manboyish mischief and an arrested but overlydeveloped interest for boobies has long-past anything resembling earning a livelihood. One thing he probably dreams about a paycheck. He probably dreams that HBO will stop ducking his calls like a Westboro Baptist avoiding a kiss hello. He's somewhere in New York dressed in street urchin ensemble plus a blue blazer trying to trade his royalty check for a bowl of soup. Although I…

It sort of says, "I'd like to talk to you about Diabetese and frisk you aggressively." It sort of says, "All you minors are coming with me." It sort of says, "I'm a life-long victim of circusrape with a darker than usual past." It sort of says, "When I shave this out of humiliation, I'm going to sew it secretly into a robe I've been making since I was fifteen." It sort of says, "All you miners are coming with me."

"Pull back the curtain," Alicia purred, "tell me what you love about me."

I heard their bodies shift on the den couch as Corbin pulled her closer to him before he replied, "I love the little things, the big ones too. I love how close we've feel, how far we've come so soon, and I love what you give me in return for killing your fear of living."

She said, "You love me for my blood money."

"Of course," he affirmed, "it's a currency beyond exchange and a commodity I wouldn't…

And so I met Alicia, Corbin's new girlfriend about a week after my wash out in the bathroom. Alicia Kellogg was a comfortably adjusted young woman, fresh off her older sisters' clothes hangers which she said was why she always smelled like cigarettes. Judging by Corbin's photo of her family, she was the pretty one with the exception of her unblinking pitch black eyes, these precociously elegant black eyes somewhere between fish, deer, and paintings of dolls. I don't think I ever saw her…

I tried city life. I got an apartment and a roommate. But then my roommate moved out one night. I needed to get some extra money, but it's a grind finding a part-time job that doesn't conflict with a full-time job. My family and friends couldn't help me.

I got desperate.



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I kidnapped a lawyer, Lee, and took him to my family's empty grain silo and set him into a large aluminum frame dog kennel. I really didn't know how much I could get for him, but it had…

I was pulled by your hand. I was beaten by your heart.  I was broken by one breath and rebuilt by your next. There is a love that is a fine thing - a commodity - an adornment like jewelry but without a finger to fit. There is a finer one yet that changes you into someone you've always been but never truly knew. This is the life I've been dying for.

At some point, everything right turns wrong. Anything we give as grace and granted may quickly degrade into merely someone else's expectation and entitlement. Every philosopher king may turn to tyranny, but more likely, it's his kid who does it. And when the solution comes, it isn't another king that sets the city straight. It's revolution. And when standards start to slip and skid, it isn't some other takers' place to coup our gifts into their pockets - it's the city's best women, men, and…

What get called vices, people keep as points of pride

until they realize that these are all of their lives.

What gets called living hard, I learned with ease -  

those symptoms soothe burden of the disease.

I know you're so pretty, girl, here in the dark,

but i'm going to spend another night at the bar.

All the stretches cut into lines;

I consider myself lucky to lose my day just one life at a time.

The first feel, that was the fitting of forms, first…

"Is there someone in that shed?"

"Yeh, it's a homeless guy."

"Really (keep walking) - It might be drowsy and angry."

"'It?' And, reallyI would be those ways too if I was homeless."

"Exactly, and they're most easily startled into violence when they're coming out of aestivation."

6

"Careful - He probably smells us."

"He probably smells crude oil and barf from being passed out in that shed all day."

"You're too…

The fulminating satisfaction for testing day-to-day disproofs, the momentary self complete with expectations and propriety, relationships in theory and intention, multiplicitives versus division: can I call falling all of me?

There is more than decomposition. There is more than these, the tumultuous rigors of breaking down. Singular in life, atomistic in essence, am I my actions, not more than my parts including my potential yet unquantified?

The fluvial flow, ever-running…

Unfortunately, our proximity puts you no closer to me. Sweet serenity, deliver me from this need to plead for old creeds.

I am such a schmuck?

Haven't I always been?

What's the difference then?

Sometimes I forget the real importance of a short-term memory.

Foster a monster - I loved an idea once, but then I lost her.  

I've been thinking about you and I (and an element of change).

My tongue tastes the grooves along the backs of my teeth as I wait to eat.

Bourbon bottles set aside, intoxicnt dreams go bloodstream swimming.

I desire your fire for  heat and light, despite burns. I'll never learn.

Crutches are cool, but at first, I was kind of shakey on them. That is just a fact of life: you have to learn to stumble before you can learn to hobble. Then I got my bearings and loosened up a bit. With some confidence and bravery - I am a very brave, brave young man - I took to the lateral motion and developed quick bursts of speed. In time this was noticed by others on crutches. I was eating delicious huevos con chorizo at la piedad when I was approached by the crutchracer…

I'm a freak, clearly and indelicately. Born with mouths for hands and a bleak inability to coordinate guitar picks against strings or drumstick against a bucket of anything, long my love of music was a burgeoning reminder of my deformity, and my creative stripes went unsewn. I love music though, and I frequent dimly lit concerts that have little-to-no hallucinogens so that my abberative body doesn't launch an unsuspecting tween into a bad trip and try to clap along. I can't clap. My…