I seem to be intent upon drinking myself to death. I have the hiccups and to my bereft, I can’t seem to think of anything worth the theft of a moment’s time. I hate this, to be honest. I wish I had my ex-partner with me here but now I have nothing except whiskey and darkness to fill my time and mind. There is absolutely no hope left in me and everything I write takes on a suicide note kind of levity. There is no way I’m getting out of this and the hiccups are the ellipses to throwing up so I don’t know why I continue to fill my cup but as soon as this sentence ends, I will be up, grabbing the bottle and placing it within easy reach.

Okay, let’s think for a second. I can’t think. I think I’m going to publish this but then I think not. I think I’m going to live through this, and then I think not.

I’m tired and my gut is filled with rot. Drink more.

That sip should have been painful but it was not. Maybe I am beyond pain, beyond the dregs, like a chorus to refrain, lost my legs and bleed out.

My mom cleans up everything. She cleaned up after her mother bled out from cirrhosis of the liver. Am I really gonna make her clean up after her son too?

Boo hoo, ya drunk.

Poor me, poor me, pour me another drink.

My alma mater said “I would have perished had I not persisted” and could there be a better post script for how I have existed, I just wonder how much longer I can persist to exist. I’ll perish on my own time. Like a dime left in the pocket after laundry time, clean and ready to be spent some time.

I wonder about my liver enzymes. Doctors run tests and they test my patience. I’m an inpatient patient without any patience, the picture of impatience.

Let’s do a rain dance.

Drink the water like whiskey and the whiskey like water.

No reason but the reason for another drink.

This day ends in ay, Tuesday, Monday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Wednesday, my my.

I only drink on days that end in ay.

Aye, aye.

But wait.

Are you saying that I have no time. Because to me, as I sit here preparing my defenses and situating myself for an attack, I can't imagine that the basic element of what I need is gone. No time. Are you sure? No time. So all those seconds, those minutes, those moments I banked---they are all gone? No. Please, be sensible.

Not a second or millisecond or moment or passing thought to spare. Nothing. There is the absence of it all, a vacuum, despair.

Crippled hands in time like aces held to the nines and then I’m giving you the beneficiaries of the fines like I don’t care, como lo dije I can’t creerle. Oh shit the transmission has lsipped up like santa clause like lobster claws like there is no just cause like slip transmission pause.

Oh now I know the beat like it moves beneath the beatles petals, like heroin in the red poppies can’t shave the top form but can’t express the mores and norms, dime la cuenta whores.

I can’t stand the unmoisturized masses and the insanity of the normal, so I write what comes next like incense smoke burning in the night on a brooklyn fire escape.

First thought, shit you’re caught , ever the last place you look , ever the moment you forgot.

Best thought, not, kidding, of course you left the key here, look what the lies forgot.

If you pause in the space between the sunlight dappled leaves then a sniper's bullet will cave away your jaw.

I don’t believe you know the difference between a .45 and a .22. If you’re doing subtraction then you don’t know the sound of the action.

Listen astutely, acutely to the message coming through the undertow of the radio, like the last schism of the fm, like the AM ante meridian, like the sound coming out to you tells you who is Judas, just the order chatting through the music.

I would listen to champagne sound like a million popped pillows singing satin refrains but I can’t see the end of the emerald isle when is sounds like an upended nile. See how those sapphires reign supreme.

Give up to the lack of serenity and the proclivity for unmentioned propensities, lost in the electronic keys of sheep that follow a shepherd’s treble clef like theory tells us what is best and practice just does the rest.

So if only the beat would crop top, drop stop or anything like an unmoistened mop. Then maybe.

But not, now, SUSAN, you’re lazy.

Lazy susans aside, we got to ride maybe till the end of the tide till the war is clarified in motifs and lore core.

Blashphemous people speak on the sums while we are counting the accountable.

Ain’t nothing worth mentioning that doesn’t go unmentioned like the truth won’t out at any moment like the truth of humanity isn’t in its memory but in its progeny.

When cyanide and phosphorus are all in the atmosphere there is nothing left to fear. What comes next after the autumnal apocalypse? Nothing left other than the unthreading of the baseball’s stitches, little red thread unraveling.

When there is nothing left in Tehran then I will understand what I have become.

What but a posthumous breath is there for us left in the stages of the exorcism of death?

Nothing but the penultimate penumbra left on the stage and Shakespeare's number is the Quintus of slaves.

I believe in civil forfeiture as long as the coast is clear and there is no sense of dying in the nadir.

Like I know what the bullet is thinking when it travels at a million centimeters a second at my head?

It is lead.

I am dead.

Nothing but a text message left unread.

Okay, pause, what is the saccharine smell of honeysuckle now to me when the ship is hauled to the lees?

Shit. Percussion cap calls it a wrap and then the bullet flies back but what can I do when all the keys are lit up like jewels and all the maps are left unperused?

Peruse.

Light the fuse.

There is nothing left but the sickle cell blood death of the bereft of the cleft palate, like I’m not around to solve it.

Antigen 560

I’m so tired.

Give me the reciprocating deviator so I can fall asleep under the numerator.

Never.

Elongating the sound of cotton placed in your ear drums I am faced with the solvency of tums, the equilibrium of thumbs, the misplacement of the misophonia that comes from otoconia displaced.

Kill me.

Please, let the schism of schizophrenia take hold.

Dripping in the solemn quagmire of a cave lost like Plato with his eyelids scorched, I can’t help but notice a specific type of reflection, like a lost connection, like a vibration that is stuck in a crustacean.

Like rock lobster, fuck the mobster.

I hate when the plague overtakes us and rats chew at our tongues.

There is little hope for humanity amidst the next outbreak.

Memory lilac mixed like time mist like a rose by another name unkissed

left leg forward with a lisp like you can’t miss this, flick of the wrist

balisong of a tryst;

finest point comes from the fingers through the wrist like the penumbra of the solar eclipse whose light she always ellipse…

I’m the one being sectioned. I called the behavioral health number and said come get me.

I walked up and handed the officer my cigarettes and he held it while another one frisked me near the entrance to my apartment complex and they formed a phalanx around me till the Cataldo came and got me.

A Black woman walked by and checked in on me and said “ya’ll having a party and you didn’t invite me” and it was the kindest thing a stranger could do for me in that moment but I said “you can hang around if you want” to defuse tension and cause that is how I talk and then locked up in McClean I often thought of my poor word choice, my poor life choices, et. cetera.

I wasn’t alone in a crowd there, cause a stranger stopped by but I was alone physically with only Dr. Solomon who taught me about choice on the line and God above when I walked into the Atlantic and was baby fragments mm abptized

turn autocorrect into hooked on phonics like I was schooled in Ebonics but I digress, to address the prompt; distressing as it was to walk into the sea surrounded by disconnected people all near me who could sea and hear the silent tears streaming down my face as I thought of Rumi and enlarging my soul and the gospel about the house not being big enough and the possibility of escape to oppose a sea of troubles and to take arms against them when it gets to be too much to take and then I thought of a feeling that wasn’t fake and I stepped into the sea inside and died easily to be reborn sea breezily.

I felt alone then but I clearly wasn’t.

And when I die alone or I die alone in a crowd of people I won’t be alone and it ain’t because I’ll have a loved one or the doctor on the phone or by my side but because we are never really alone on this ride.

Before the ground was grounding and the sky wasn’t a ceiling but a comforter over our heads to keep the monsters under the bed; before the sky, well.

Every story starts “and then, the sky fell” cause absolutely-fucking-no-one, nobody no how, wants to talk about how things are now.

After.

After the sky, literally, fell.

Fucking hell. There is one ring we wish unrung but damn it all, don’t you know, the church bell fell and it cracked that son of gun.

Don't break small rules when you break big ones.

You're carrying a class A narcotic with intent to distribute. You are crossing the street. Why would you wait for the crosswalk? Why wait for the flashing orange hand to turn to a little striding white man (racist), why so serious about it?

Jaywalk son, everyone does!

Wouldn't you? Why so serious?

Me. I'm not. But I am. Listen.

I cross in the crosswalk and only on the walk signal.

I take it serious as shit even if I have to wait for a bit

but I also know that to live on the

Wilde side I have to remember that life is "far to important a thing to be taken seriously" so I'm not always so serious wit it and I member time was I got turned round with weight in the trunk and accidently ended up driving in circles around Jake's parking lot on the way to drop in off for the college kids near Villanova and I chased streetlamps and played cards like a cereal killer whose verbosity was inversely proportional to the chemical aftertaste internal mind escapes from frosted special K flakes that stayed on me like dandruff, cause you know I lived a bit rough and only money and white privilege saved ya boi, so know the mental is like a koi pond and I be swimming in the beyond, no seriously, nothing is wrong, just nuffin bruv, to speak on how we dance from song to song and shuffle along this mortal coil, chortle as we cut our noses to spite our face to face with myself I can't held but look a garden sentence in the face off with one another and come together to all split the sumptuous prize money between 218 and county 3 dollars is what ladies and whatever who cars about gender at this fucking point, why so serious? party people I know I'm definitely not serious

except when I need to be.

I am watching the bowl and I saw you pick this up so now you are it. Either you walk out of here with another person's pinky to deposit in your kitchen garbage disposal before midnight tonight or you deposit you own pinky in the kitchen garbage disposal by midnight tonight. Failure to do either of these options will result in your death in 3 days.

All I knew was Tommy said something. That was all she said. Was they were getting ready for Church and Tommy said something. Because I never thought there was anything wrong in y'all's family, y'know, and I told Phil, before Sean, well you know, that Tommy seemed like the perfect Father caused he never raised his voice and I was always getting on Phil cause he always was yelling at Sean and even slapped him once but they got along fairly well, but I think I yelled at Phil more than anything, but the thing of it was that Tommy called me looking for her and he said that he hadn't seen her in three days and I just thought that was odd.

I remember the place. I remember it. We went back when I was older as a family with my dad because my first memory of the cabin was being in it with both of them. The carpet had knots in it that caught little particles of dust and skin like delicately tied flies cast upon a river and they had bought me a k'nex toy, a big one, that had a motor that I could assemble into a variety of things.

That is weird that you went back.

Well, it was a nice vacation spot. It was nice. The cabins. It was in Minnesota or somewhere. But I know exactly what happened even though I have no memory of the first time because it was always the same. We must have been getting ready to go to that mega church. I liked that one because the guy told nice stories about being nice even though I didn't like the whole intensity of the place and they never answered my questions in the youth group and they smiled too vapidly, I never liked the churches, even when we moved and tried all the other ones later, I always found God in church basements or in the hopeless places more than I found him/her/them/whatever in the pews. But regardless, it must have just been a stress thing because it was always about keeping up appearances and we were probably late and they got in a fight and she took off with me and didn't call to spite him and I don't know if he was still drinking back then but maybe he went on a bender but who knows it was probably that type of thing.

Oh. Well, I guess that makes sense. Cause I always thought it was weird. Y'all seemed so put together.

I remember going there with both of them. We went fishing. That is were I developed my fear of fish. That is why I'm so fucking scared of fish. Can't even deal with minnows cause we were in that little canoe and the pike that my Father reeled in was on the bottom thrashing around and the teeth gnashing around and

I bet

So I don't remember the first trip at all. Remember how I went to that place and they gave me those diagnoses and how they don't call it PTSD they call it complex PTSD, as if it is complex, and not quite so simple and I aint trying to get into the whole thing but like that is part of it was it jus things being all unstable and shit

So you don't remember

No, I didn't even know we went until you said that Tommy had called looking for her. I remember bits of the second one but it is interesting that the only memory you have of a crack in the surface is a memory that I don't have, because from the outside I bet it looked varnished as shit though because I thought if I kept up the outside image it would fix it inside our house and inside me.

The high life.

Yup.

Well, they did the best they could I guess.

I think they did. They were fucked up from what they went through which, as you know, was no fucking picnic, and I'm fucked up and I know that I'm way more fucked up than them. And they've been patient with me. They've shown grace. I took their issues and doubled, quadrupled down on them and I'm beyond fucked up at this point but I'm working on it.

I guess that is all you can do. How is the budgeting going?

Not well. But I'm okay with it. I wanted to live by the beach and now I live by the beach. And I'm relying a lot less on them for any financial support so I can meet them on more equal terms and maybe we do some family therapy but either way I'm going to do my therapy or die trying. Like a 50 cent type of thing.

Like the rapper?

Yeah, do you listen to him?

No, I don't really like rap. Your Daddy knows, Phil and I always liked Country, or Classic Rock. Sometimes showtunes. Dodo, liked fancy music, whatever the people downtown in the fancy clubs were listening at the moment, that's what she said she liked.

Man, we got the issues like tissues. Pulling em out of the box. Coming by it honest, at least.

Are you still afraid of fish?

Sometimes. And sharks. They live on the Cape and the Cape has sharks. Where I live has shit in the water and needles on the beach sometimes but they try to clean the beach up. But the sunrise and sunset is nice and moon on the water is reflective.

Do you go in the water?

All the time.

All the time?

All the time.