I considered my choices, then asked the question that has brought my wife so much pain over the years. "Which is cheaper?"

It was almost like I was dreaming, he is saying, my visit to the ruins of the factory that made the first Narrative Machines.

“I fly in my dreams,” his mother said. “It's my privilege.”

Why do you lie? the old woman repeats when her mouth is not busy filling the waste bin. We sit as far away from her wheedle and wretch as the small waiting room allows. A young woman glares at us through the mental health clinic's safety glass…

“You've got to be kidding me. A robot?”, said Marge as she rotated in the chair at her desk. She removed the leaf of paper from the typewriter and set in down on the desk. She looked up at Parkins who was leaning against the wall nursing a cold cup of…

I'm the first child she ever knew that couldn't sing.

I was sitting there drinking with Paul at the bar, and it was a Friday night and I was I was feelin good. I didn't have to go to work in the morning, and I had a few drinks and food in me, and I able to that on da cheap, which felt good. And Paul…

I even listen to the Ugly Kid Joe version. I fall asleep perplexed and disheartened.

Dawn is a grey mass, what is left of the night's chill slips between my t-shirt and belly skin. Somewhere else you once wrote that being loved when you don't love in return equals rape.

Standing there as you walked away from me that late March afternoon, in the park off Meridian Street, the spring tableau seemed

mind heart soul will blood sweat tears muscle, and bone,/and then always something else—not more, just else . . .

You sleep in equative lip biting slumber hugging a pillow you think is someone else.

you look like the insides of my cheeks chewed.

She is a manifold of temporal flows.

Then there she is, and she makes me love-sad; it's a vehement, absolute, hard love-sad no one else needs to understand, though they can see; it's an emotion so concrete it's felt from the chest, not from a tenuous concept called heart.