Cocaine flame in my bloodstream, sold my coat when I hit Spokane, bought myself a hard pack of cigarettes in the early morning rain.

I went sniffing around that old flat we used to share and it was hollow and dank, birthing darkness from it's center that the light from the windows could not overcome and your smell had long since melted away.

I walked outside and looked at the river and let the rain have me and I don't know for how long, all I know is that I am…

In the late night study sessions, the ones with the beer and chips and giggling and without the books, she had proudly maintained that he was the one professor she would screw for a grade, if it came to it.

So here she sat, intentionally his last appointment on a Friday afternoon, her jeans like some sort of additional membrane, blouse cut low enough to see all of the poor decisions that had lead to her 68 average in his class, feeling vaguely reptilian as his wife and…

7AM: In the maudlin and gauzy light of dawn the promontory draws itself into the sky above me, the old jigsaw stone peering down on the broken mess of me like a disappointed father standing over a son who's just fallen off his bicycle again.

8AM: The pain is like something out of a medieval fable and I'm cold and the world is getting smoky and thin.

9AM: I can't know when they might find me under the mantlepiece but I pulled the thing on the box and the blink is…

She laid the blankets and the sweaters in the old pine chest and then arranged them, shuffled them, took some out and moved others and replaced those removed, as though they were school children requiring deliberate placement lest troublemakers be seated together. Above the lid of the chest a window to the west, the sun bleeding the last white daubs off the spines of the Smokies, a choir of wildflowers in the nearer valley fields swaying in synchronous chaos, each hearing a different band…

At one of those old metal tables with the flecked formica top, the bare bulb hanging above your sweaty hands, the soldering iron melting something it shouldn't be while you stare, gaping at the white smoke and the screaming and the blood in Boston, your sad little root hard as Chinese algebra.

You're already thinking of ways you could have done better, caused more chaos, killed more people.

Before you start jerking off to your terror porn, I want to direct your…

On trying to find a good girl...

Ain't no good girls and anybody tells you they is ain't got a hair on his ass.

Only difference twixt "good girls" and "bad girls" is how safe the girl need to feel to do the kinky shit they all want to do, every last one of em. Some girls just don't give a wet biscuit bout anything and they will do what they have in their heads to do with the first stiff thing they come across. The ones you call "good girls" are really…

A red salvation in whipping sounds, splats and giggles.

Tearing a hole in the everything of how she was to me and carving out the soul and killing it on the nightstand.

In the placement of these ornaments will they know the breadth and the depth, the ocean of what she did to me when she took me into that warm room and opened the window and turned out the lights and left and locked the door and froze me from the inside out.

And I take out the…

The piece of paper itself is scary as the blackest shrieking freak that ever laid its hot breath over your dreams.

Do not read the words but hold it away, look at it as one piece, and it is a collection of slashes and dried drops of some liquid or another and you begin to realize that it is not a letter but simply the continuation of a murder, the spastic tremblings of a monster in…

I think the most disturbing thing about it is the smears.

No, the lines are no longer so military and no, the diction is no longer so proper and no, the punctuation is no longer so Strunk and White...but have you ever tried to write a postcard on your knee, with the quill pen and red ink you stowed in the breast pocket of your jacket, still starved for…

Louis Diemschutz was nearly home when she met the man near Mitre Square.

Earlier that evening she'd been arrested for public drunkenness, barely able to stand, and when the recording constable at the station asked her name she had replied "Nothing." At around 1:30am, three club-goers report seeing Nothing talking to a man, standing close, her hand on his chest, lightly though, and not in a manner to suggest she wanted him away.

Didn't she smell it on him? When…

Horses know things.

She lay across the entrance of Dutfield's Yard with rain coming like retribution, as if it aimed to scour away something grievous and ugly, and even in that pitch black wet Louis Diemschutz's pony knew something was there and would not enter. Diemschutz thought she was passed out drunk - wouldn't have been the first whore he'd had to drag out of the way of his cart - but she didn't move when he nudged her and he bent over to find that he would not be…

He refers to it as his work, and lovingly, as might a violinist or a chef.

He says that he shant quit ripping until he is buckled and that the proper red stuff he saved to use as ink congealed before he could put pen to it and he promises to take the ears from the next one and asks for the letter to be kept back until he has a chance to do more work.

Can you see him? The image is always the same, a man dark and gentile and topped with a stovepipe in some smokey…

I have been looking all over for you.

Everything is pale blue and everybody has the same face and I texted you the smell of this beach and you didn't respond and if you don't get here the set is going to sun without me with you.

I can't be me without you.

Your bare back on the edge of the bed, you know what I mean, with those two little dimples right above your butt when you stretch and arch and I walked all the way down Alamitos from 7th to…

She took your order in the cafe yesterday and you thought to yourself how maybe you had never seen a human being try so hard to smile and still not quite get it done.

There is a plain man who loves her without pretense and has told her for years that she's too good for him and at times she has believed him, but when she holds her sandals in her hand and stares off the boardwalk at the ocean he looks at her like she only just appeared there and then she thinks maybe it's the…

At 5A.M. I heard the bells and rose. The mist seemed to keep the sound close and long around me, laying it about my shoulders as if perhaps I might need protection against the day, that something old and hungry might hide in the crags above and the ringing of the bells might stay with me, a talisman.

My feet set about the way and when I needed my hands I put them on the wet earth and everything was in that fog, voices of children lost and content, a…

If you would profess to be a Christian in this world, meet people where they are, love them how they need to be loved, and don't say a damn word about what they should or shouldn't do or be because that's not your call.

Keep your eyes up - the things that constantly look at the ground are the things that get eaten.

Find something that you love to do that doesn't hurt anyone then do the hell out of that thing.

Seems that it's somehow always been…

It was Amos Lee although she had no idea, only that the voice coming from the speakers sounded like it had traveled a long way to get there, as if piped into the car by time cable from the dim and smoky stage of a 1962 St. Louis bar. Moon was the only thing in the windshield, nor was there room for anything else.

Words were stumbling out of his mouth and she said he needed to stop and whether he heard her…

The older Latino gentleman got out of his car and said he was all right and never wavered, and I said I was sorry about sixty three times and each time he said it was fine, accidents happen, and he never stopped smiling and he looked at me as if he knew something about me that I don't know.

No one works for me anymore. I am finally not a boss and I hope never to be again, because I do not have a degree in psychology and I do all the parenting I need to do in my…

The place where I live is full of gentle hills that roll and cant against one another as if long ago God was unsatisfied with the flatness of the land and lifted it like a rug, gave it a brief shake, and laid it down rumpled.

It's not fast and not slow and it seems that people around here are generally judicious in the use of their days, working enough, laughing enough, looking around them some, talking some and then shutting their mouths and letting the world…

He'd never admit it but sometimes he listened to songs in languages he didn't understand, with bass lines like the black forest rumblings of rumored tribes never seen, pounding the day off him, cracking the crust and shaking it down and allowing him to feel like he could move again.

Not often but occasionally he would sleep like an innocent and wake in the morning feeling like a new kind of man, a giant man, and his eyes would narrow and he would ponder very difficult things -…