God's honest truth, I wake up every morning when my clock punches out its dulcet, insistent clangs, a setting called Ultra Zen Up & Out. I brush my teeth with a blue dollar store toothbrush and watch one of the five morning TV shows designed to let me know the weather…

Fax me back to South Street listening to the dumpster / trumpeter, standing like licorice in the rain, / as the fetid officers assemble for the raid

I concluded that Parisian sexuality must be partially indebted to the cricket or grasshopper. The entrance to their flat was a wood door scarred by scriptures common to places frequented by people who have not yet made their mark on the world.

The weatherman can't predict accumulation. He can only tell you it will be cold. Expect ice, wind, snow, expect delays. Your daughters play outside, dancing around the Evergreen, its branches bearing the weight of snow, its branches

Phil doesn’t know anything. He thinks his truck is possessed by his dead mother.

He was a sushi chef, and he would spend hours in their kitchen practicing his knife skills, and the speed with which he can put that there and this in that and so on; and she would see him on the floor most mornings, still wearing that dirty, tattered ban

I blinked the darkness out of my eyes and saw the man again; I could smell his breath. Just like dad’s. I must have fallen asleep. My eyes felt so heavy. I was cold. Why was I cold?

ANTHONY I decide after Jill and I have dinner at her flat and smoke an enormous joint that I need to call Tyler, a conversation I'm not particularly looking forward to. I leave and she's not happy, but I tell her I have homework and we kiss a little bit…

We need to keep writing because the great ones aren’t always that great We need to keep writing to insure that the future even has a future We need to keep writing because the wind won’t know how or when to listen if we don’t

I almost forgot. Her nipples taste like that syrup from a can of peaches. The kind you aren’t supposed to eat if you are 18 or older. The kind that adds baggage to the hips and I’m certainly not about to take out an insurance policy on my ass.

And you lean forward and all of that caffeine anxiety rises up in your throat, the pressure in your jaw, a series of weights and pulleys on your teeth and at the back of your mouth. So when you open your mouth to talk, no sound is made, only the sound of

Still no rain. Eight months, says Hollister. More like nine, says James Earl. We stand in Hollister’s high meadow, what’s left of it.

In his mind, he could hear Eve’s voice, “We had some good times, didn’t we?”

They rise up, a sullen, sorrowful/ army of reproach, staring,// stone-faced but eyed with fire.

I cannot find my way back to the bubbling navel of the universe because of Spongebob Squarepants.