on writing chapter five

I sneezed while stepping out of my truck yesterday. Some woman in a minivan at the Stop sign  behind me said "Bless you." I thanke...

He pulls it out of my mouth the drill  for long enough that I can see the score: physics versus two humans left in space for 286 days. Parac...

We're all born the same way fresh and blank with factory settings. It's what we do over decades and how we age that defines us: whic...

We all had that friend with a BB in his face-- the answer man with a lion's share of walking pneumonia. Shorthand in muscle memory as sm...

Defending creative control technophobe: "Your bruises, they suit you." It sutures the same. Emergency contact what's your mark...

A lover left me a bag of spinach leaves before her flight to those who mean more on holidays or any. Poking through them  tonight, plucking ...

We bellyache vaguely of the holiday blues. I'll lay mine out for you: There was a brief time in my life when I was  almost the hero. Est...

You begged me to win your tits in a cancer  awareness charity auction in which a bust of your breasts was entered painted to draw a fan of t...

How'll I sleep without your mane in my face? My brothers in Christ we're on a roll tonight. Cracking wise at old holes  glamorized c...

You spend  so much time looking for what  might not exist that you forget your own response for whenever  the excuses fly from fellow hacks:...

There are few who've ever called me Billy, even as a kid. It's Bill, it's Will, it's William if I'm in trouble. I'd ...

Find it. Open it. Close it. Bury it again. Pretend you didn't see it. There are reasons it's in the past.

The scents of fresh fruit and rotting leaves are in the air, mixed with salt from the brackish Hudson on a Saturday morning. It's the ea...

There's a limit to my love: Slowly Become What You Most Feared Extravaganza. I've seen  shooting stars. I've watched women shoot...

The most beautiful blonde I've ever spooned needed a place to stay a year ago so I started to cook more and bought her a dresser. I stil...

There are sins unforgivable: not for all the  Key lime pie on the Eastern Seaboard; not even if you know to take your hair down before bed. ...

You're nothing but purse dirt. Say it back: Your words hurt. Carbon copy reruns are too blunt are too curt. Time's been too kind to ...

The kid's bus unloaded at the Away Team's arena before my Union contract's dismissal time allowed for an expedient commute up th...

It took nine months but I'm grieving your loss Margot Robbie; those dirty foot milkshakes left at my door. We couldn't watch anythin...

If you care to listen I could tell you a lot about a little: A fed bear is a dead bear; dire desperation at the mercy of technology; stolen ...

"Do I snore?" I ask her after hearing  such rumblings and wondering if it's only gossip as the trend goes with me. She giggles...

Varm:  "We've known they're broken, but..." Zoin:  "How'd you try to fix it?" Varm:  "I helped them rel...

One of the first people I met when I came here a-decade-and-a-half ago jumped off a bridge a few months back. I'd heard it on the radio ...

Today I paid a woman and a man to undo the will of God. As usual, one of my insurance companies was also involved. "You're here for...

Stop me if I've told you this one before, but when my dad was a kid his father took him and his two siblings to their lakefront property...

"But Sir, we can't get them all out in time." How does one choose? [Vague explosions.] "Sir? Sir!" One doesn't. ...

For several days my morning commute was shoving your favorite tree down my throat into these tarnished lungs where it mixed with smoke befor...

We hate it we do but sometimes we have to  acknowledge that its shell is cracked its limbs are limp and keep driving.

Scientists say that tears shed in sadness  (bitter) taste differently from those spilled in joy  (sweet) and sweat due to stress smells wors...

Most jokes start in prison or to get into her pants; not this one. You receive congratulations from a number you haven't seen in too lon...

"You've been talking a lot of shit." "There's a lot of shit to talk." "Are you hurting?" "I'm...

Artificial sweeteners antiperspirants' aluminum arsenic in apple seeds asbestos everywhere living next to power lines secondhand smoke f...

Cut so deeply by another one you've loved you slice open the parcel sent to her  old address slightly aroused by the sweet revenge of a ...

Whenever she comes don't put up a fight. Walk alongside her not knowing the destination: Whether the temperature quickly rises or you se...

I swore I was doing the right thing, though that's usually where we lose it.  At dinner a few nights prior my father and my brother had ...

Most people are sick and you know it but don't want to confess let alone repent. I'm here to acknowledge that for your sake and mine...

Forsythia for Cindy with eyes that get slammed shut. A sugarcoated hobby horse rusted to irrelevance. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. A r...

I wish  I could say something to make you feel better son.

It's comical in that 2020s way for a man who's sought solace in fiction and history for the better part of his life to suddenly susp...

"I can hear you coughing in the shower a place I am  no longer welcome with you. It breaks my heart."

It's funny what you pick up from your parents. When I was a kid I found a few wine corks with initials and dates written on them among m...

[For Jeff Newman who saw my mother pushing me in a stroller around Rockland Lake in 1986 and said I should have been his.] Three years ago w...

Pulling up to my old man's place the house I'm still trying to grow up in four decades later I notice rust-red rotten wood at the cu...

Sunbeams  chopped by each tree  along the highway. Every ray  hits eyes like Morse code  for "torture". Closing them doesn't h...

Undesired creature comforts: her favorite meal; not mine-- delivered to my doorstep while an old friend bought me time. The laces of these b...

Beware of the man robbed of purpose. He leaves his pistols where home was these days since he's poised like a spring indecipherable hung...

Our Maker's lath and plaster a ribcage and skin barely conceal the stubborn organ that feigns  the most precious emotion  that we  as a ...

My father's killed two deer in his lifetime: one intentionally with his bow on state park land and one accidentally with his sport utili...

Listen, I don't make the rules or whatever but my favorite book as a toddler was "Stevie's Tricycle". No, I couldn't r...

My favorite place to see you's  on mountaintops since I know that's where  you belong though I'd suffer a nosebleed via horse he...

You tally the hands that have touched you this week: the deli lady taking eight quarters in her leathery palm for commute coffee; a coworker...

Your body's quite the temple As far as I'm concerned. All it guarantees, though Is to hurt and learn. This Club of Sleepless Nights ...

I found your lost earring in a room I never showed you and while that might deter most I've played the dead cat, as well.

You can try to talk us down but I'll walk us down from the gallows. You can say that it's been a fight but the best fish do until th...

A bearded farce the ringleader puts his best foot forward for the motherlode. You don't even know her favorite tree. Can you feel me nip...

For lack of a better response upon opening his final Christmas gift he mentally calculates  how much of a mess it'd make if he were to s...

The second best way to spend a wet but unseasonably warm Sunday afternoon once the pile of dishes has been washed in water just shy of scald...

It starts the same: We see a swan killed by an 18-wheeler or the people designated to protect us prove their humanity too soon. We meet the ...

You can quote scripture. We're playing with fire. You can hope she never called another man "Sailor". A cello that we can'...

A siren whom you've despised took it upon herself to tell me of your engagement today going so far as to send photos now burned into my ...

It's been a year. Too old for kids now or to start over. Apprentices'll have to do. A Rubik's Cube; the 9 of swords; at 39 sudde...

For three long days that patch of hardened mud was cordoned off by the Department of Public Works: One to fell the tree whose roots had lift...

I pluck the forked twig from her potted rubber plant's soil and thrust it into my aloe's earth hoping it'll persuade its growth ...

What it sometimes means to be a friend to the friendless: weaponized sex for strategic advantage. The cigarette ruined the photo. The rest o...

My head rests on his shoulder in the Sunday stillness of his bedroom. I stroke his broad chest back and forth like the tide of the river he...

Between measurements and cuts at one of  our many vices he blurts  what he shouldn't with me  as his only witness. I remind him of his t...

Few want the truth partner (as my newly departed  uncle used to call me a la spaghetti Western) but you ain't  the only one who bunches ...

The garbage can stank like meat juice on styrofoam so I took it for a walk to the dumpster behind my building. After chucking the trash I sw...

Afterwards she rubs his bare chest like it's a brass lamp with a genie inside though no wishes will be granted to either party. The smel...

As with the most intriguing nicknames I never knew its explanation but from as early as I can remember my uncle called me Turkey Breath. Thi...

It takes this many to wonder how many curse the scent of Polo Sport in my wake.

The two main European despots defeated in the Second World War and the third supreme leader of that continent a tentative ally later turned ...

Wiping flecks of blood from the medicine cabinet mirror after flossing makes us war buddies now. It pays the same. "Long live the king....

On the warpath  with nothing sacred left: the high ground the Heimlich the wear and tear of highway miles. Outgunned: to love without having...

While embraced in bed  what they never realize  until it's the worst thing too late and they're poised to spring  like rats from a s...

Then an angel of the Hebrew god all safely clad in silver impaled itself  slowly on what was never meant to be said-- a dagger emblazoned in...

Get on that boat. Stare into the sun. Keep your mouth closed. Blame it on the spray. A friend  who knows nothing of your plan is harder to i...

Hydroplaning down the Palisades Interstate Parkway while watchlisted in the wild gin wasteland but grateful for the growls from widespread e...

Excited to decipher your surprise after facing tribulations back on the mainland we practice for the apocalypse with end cut maple.

You don't know, and you don't know--and you don't know and you don't know: That was the last of the towels that I didn't...

If only it were only your cursive words in chalk on fifteen magnetized spice shakers half-full of leaves and peels that we dehydrated but th...

Not long enough to twirl at night or matter to most passesrby strange tufts of hair stepped over by coronated impostors on an even stranger ...

Things I'm not: Christlike. Able to fix my dead  grandmother's antique and bequeathed dresser drawer handle. Things I am: Decent at ...

Let's suppose since we're being frank  that there's no way  to properly process what's entailed in quantifying this tower-bo...

That sucker-punch killed my butterflies. Like a gutshot buck I wander, confused only knowing of the blood. We've met many times before. ...

This Pisces  ain't picking a fight or mentioning your unmentionables but I'll be goddamned if I enter again the War of Northern Aggr...

There are worse fates than being forgotten like being remembered by the wrong people. And there are worse plans than breaking them with folk...

The gas station coffee's too hot  to chug at 5:58 AM en route to work so we fill our first few highway miles with recent recollections o...

The unrealistic sexual expectations prevalent in the modern male are direct byproducts of an Internet with 20% of its phone searches being r...

I've always lost people but never  cigarette lighters. The latter I find on the pavement. The former find reasons to hit it. If you need...

An undeniable mess was made but the umbrella's dry now so I bring it inside from the hallway and return it to the closet horse-trading t...

Maybe she's getting  her back blown out by a guy with more length and less girth. Maybe it's the reaction that her skin has to mine ...

84,000 people were sacrificed over the course of four days in the 1480s-- hearts ripped out with obsidian blades no neighbors or kin safe fr...

Somewhere  out there you're bleeding and I wish that I could help but here we are pretending like we're able to buy time.

But oh the air of the heir apparent in coming home to a glass of water left by a guest: You know  that you can't drink from it as hard a...

Jupiter and Venus are pegged above the moon  tonight naked  to the eye like you  in a few more decades all four sneering at the marvels  of ...

You're probably pissed that I vouched extensively  over the phone as to how valid a candidate he was for 20 emphatic minutes when you we...

They ask what happened after nearly five years together, but not as discovered too late. Shrugged shoulders and blown lips don't explain...

I'd propped the Remington against a closet door frame in the spare room of what was my apartment again since I could then without questi...

One of these days and days and days and days the Universe will send  a sympathetic seventh chance who wouldn't leave anyone on read with...

Not to jinx it by being brazen with Lady Luck but we haven't had  a major airline catastrophe in what feels like longer than I remember ...

I shaved my head after bald spots developed stress induced again and my father asked  if I wear a wool hat to work  when he saw me but I don...

Walking by portraits of men in my home and mannequins  on the job I can attest to the fact that we all wear smiles differently. Some of them...

A charity organization for cancer, but not for bald kids line mine finally sends  her complimentary address labels  though she's no long...

Unwilling to verify whether or not the experiment's been performed since science has been bastardized and the Internet's been hijack...

I bet Bukowski was better in bed and Hemingway was more fun at the bar. I'd kill to converse like Vonnegut and speak of the dead like Mc...

I, [state your name],  was nothing short of mortified by the wasteful void at the bottom right corner of p. 62 in November's  tidal issu...

This is the first time I'm saying this but I know that I'm dying. My hair's falling out in clumps fistfuls in the shower; the bl...

Teach me to poach an egg. I'll teach you to poach a heart. We'll teach each other many things we've failed to learn so far. I ha...

It's all we have to be all we are for whoever's left who will listen.

"I see that you didn't shave today to fit into your character." When I was a kid my old man was asked to play the Penitent Thi...

You really haven’t lived  until you’ve watched a rainstorm  from an open garage door  on a farm in western Vermont  with a mason jar of Arge...

Going to market or gallows the same: This facelessness endures/ Dehumanization. (They beg for more.) Don't ask him to break stride while...

In the bowels  of a storage unit I puked into during a move eleven years back I find a pristine tackle box that he made for me  decades ago:...

The artist tried to warn me on the gripe with purple ink. I look now at my shoulder where my skin has faded:  pink. Currently reading: ...

The shot rings out as desired. If they can't spare one they can't have any. "Armorer!" his intended customer three stories...

Computers too  are hindered by memory consumption.

While bushwhacking this morning my mentor took a tumble after gaining much momentum down grade too steep for his knees. I watched him land h...

Our father called to ask the inevitable. I knew it’d come; didn’t hasten its arrival. “I want you to teach him to shoot.” My upbring...

A night of venting through towers leads to feared cliche: "It'll come together as it should," she states from a stat...

A friendly deli Hindu drops the plastic fork for my owed shot of potato salad on his contaminated counter missing my paper bag-- his i...

Henry Repeating Arms an American standard unrelated to plumbing fixtures released it this year: A lever-action carbine chambered for .2...

With more pinned on him than Judas aside from tuberculosis the dentist-turned-gambler and part-time pistolero saved or avenged a few ...

My old man'll turn 69 tomorrow but I can't go see him to celebrate. I'm sick o'discussing the Cause. The world hides ...

The best way to kill something that's ever meant anything to you: Repeat it until it means nothing. Currently reading: ...

There's a tractor-trailer canted at sixty degrees over a ditch at the otherwise quiet highway rest stop I'm passing. An oversi...