It’s funny how strongly you can crave another person and touch and salvation and certain songs and edibles and solace and sleep and solitude and passion and drugs and the past and for time to switch speeds and change and seasons and answers and this is for those that have punched walls and for drummers and the backyards and I miss the library so much

and Julie, please stop drinking—your expensive wine is pouring out your bank account. I hate that women depress you and that reading up on the news gets you weeping. We both write paragraphs beginning with “this goddamned war..” But Julie this isn’t about you. It’s actually about this musician I fell for when I was sixteen and the conartist that followed him, the bookstore I worked in and Courthouse Square in December and oh my senses are so exhausted. Gulping coffee and oh but nothing. Beer bottle thrown against the curb and my brother I was so tempted to not move to go to bed with glass in my jeans and hands. It was a season lacking evidence and I was after proof. Mock me and make me and leave me alone and hold me and all those strangers that you’ve called baby, and all those places you’ve called home and all my words, they are but mannequin smoke rings and plastic exhaust and my god—

there is no god. There are gorgeous combustible convinceables, my tethered talula, solid on self-destruction. But there is no god. No man upstairs sucking the nutrients drawn to the surface of a bitten bottom lip, tats of teeth marks like little bridges in the flesh. Aside from the ears you own there are none other dedicated solely to just listening to you—there is no man to sweep you away, no knives being nice when they shave Europe from the clouds.