The Second Law of Thermodynamics

 When we passed the lesbian couple looking at breakfast bars, and the cute girl on the other side of them, and my daughter was scolding me from the passenger seat of the shopping cart and my face was a mask of patience, a mask cracked and possibly showing the anxiety biting the back of my neck or the scream I had been choking down, I thought to that grim audience who did not care for my existence, I'm sorry for doing this in public but I don't get to take a break for my collapse, I have to keep buying food for the kids and responding to their questions with quiet patience and all I can do is break and disintegrate inside which is why I look this way.

I didn't recognize the number so I was leery when I picked up, and in retrospect I was surprised at how easily she convinced me it was not a scam--that she really was here to serve me with papers from my wife's lawyer--so much so, that even when I got downstairs to receive them, and found the letter was open-faced and un-enveloped with every piece of our situation available for anyone to read, there in a woman's hands whom I'd never before seen in my life--so much so, I say, that I still thanked her.

Because my friend asked and because she insisted on presenting to me more and more outlandish and devastating scenarios of my collapse, my ruin, my eradication and homelessness and hopelessness and horrifying evisceration, I observed with no employment, no marriage, no community, aging--I thought about it and realized I don't know, I suppose, what it would take, or what it will take, or what it has taken already perhaps, to really break me: to make me whisper, "I can't take it anymore," and then, to be honest, I would not kill myself but I would turn my face to a wall and simply never rise again, not to eat or drink or shit or bleed or anything, I would just lay in that place until I died of all the idiotic blank inaction that brought me to that mental state to begin with, and the procrastination and unwitting laziness that broke me would then heal the world of me with nothing left but a corpse to take away.

All this behind my eyes, lodged somewhere behind my sinuses, as we passed the cheez-its and I told a four year old we didn't need them and she scowled at me and set up a complaint targeted to gain the attention of that couple and that girl and the sob in my throat around which I gingerly stepped to vocalize something soothing and appeasing while I pushed the cart towards milk, towards bread, towards the vegetables, towards home, towards sleep, towards some other day when some other troubles would grind and gnash and mulch these current horrors into soil.

December 2024

[here is the thing—]

here is the thing—

i want to tell you about the sunrise.
in an unguarded moment i think
you would like this, the drama of it
with an old smile in my heart:
then i remember all the pain I've caused you,
how i am trying to free you from me,
and the sunrise flames to char.
a familiar lump settles in my neck,
because this is how i love you—
but i never helped you see it
and now i hope you never do.








10/07/24

i don't know

why there was a rusting 42 gallon barrel in the backyard or

why i hid in the green onions behind it from the teenagers and

how to feel about getting pushed down stairs when adults weren't looking, nor

how to think of fresh or ancient rejections while driving home from work, nearly 40.




that little boy behind the oil drum who must be enough, whether or not:

whether he is with a wife or without; with a good life or without; with potential lovers or without.




why this weeping woman would confess to a small boy hiding behind an oil drum

that his friend, who she has loved for 20 years, is a near-martyred saint with a perfect cock,

if the little boy, sucking the end of a green oninon, can only turn himself into absolute nothingness in order to provide--

what could even be provided, he wondered, but it seemed like comfort, costing him something equally indistinct.




why his caring mother should care so deeply about preserving his infidelous marriage

that her voice should break like the skin of his emotions leaving bright new scars across the top of old,

which he should worry about, metasticizing tissues at his age or death,

how you might describe it.




why lovers stop talking to him sometimes slowly or all at once, leaving him then

if he can pull back, ascending in macroscope to clouds, then galaxies, then abandoning

the limits of his body and his heart (my heart), the plausible weakness of existence, even the question of whether i care

whether i am alive enough to recognize my own enoughness, elevated so far i am perhaps puncturing the basement of reality




where i am enough, as is, with nothing else

if the little boy was also enough








05/01/24

i forget to remember

Make the assumption

you aren’t desired
see what it does, how it
seeps into you:
unwanted, cast off
at the moment, the millisecond
when love seemed at reach:
it’s not this time, or situation
but you specifically
love denied, wanting nothing more
with you.
You know it’s false
but feel it anyway, scum:
only despair can lead you
to repentance & repair.

1/20/22

suspension

stone suspended midair

“potential energy” was the term
wanting to fall

a 9 ounce human heart pumping
3 millionths of a gram of adrenaline
can shake this body like a rag

i stole glances at her eyes, lips,
the curve of a cheekbone, of a smile, of
a potential energy

her mind a fire in my mind
energy circling mine
tempts motion to unfreeze in time

so my stone heart shivers
one millionth of a gram away
from a rockfall plunge into kinesis

i hold it up; it will not move
but potential is undeniable
wanting to fall

1/20/22