[7] Scraps.
05/02/2006 12:12 a.m.

I believe in the unborn skin beneath fingernails.

I met a boy this once,
A caricature of six different cities,
Who personified red-neck rock’n’roll
And cheap flea-market tattoos.

I write everything on legal pads and breathe the heat of the sun.
I am systematically addicted. I know you better than you think.

How many times have you been frightened that there wasn’t enough blood running through your veins? This emptiness, this hollowness, do you feel fragile?
Do you believe in the steady collapse of every capillary? Do you believe in this ultimate defeat?

In these past days I’ve made a friend. The way I always make just the one friend. The way the world startles me.
He is over twice my age. We get along.
I like to define myself as human with this pen, with this script. Who is granted this absolute from me?

I feel better, and I can aim a gun. Really, I don’t think I would mind dying.
This is a matter of great public importance. I grew up in the arms of Miami and never looked back. I demand war crimes. Past and Present.

It is in the evenings that I lose my tolerance to the throes of sleep and loss. I once met a girl who smelled like clove cigarettes, and I bet her lips tasted like sugar. For eons I’ve tried to be gay and it just hasn’t worked. I want to write poetry but I’ve run out of cohesive subjects. I am musty with delusions of grandeur.

And nobody can tolerate anybody just being a good person anymore. I want liquid movement without static noise. White noise?
I need this tolerance. I need this rock of calm and suffering more than I need anything in the world.

I have come to this mute decision.
This clarification comes with the lowest and dirtiest peak of this slump.
I believe deeply in words like ostentatious. I believe in bad spelling.

It is constant, the way my skin blisters and bruises. Along with my soul, I gave blood the other day, and passed out with my head in a red-plastic bag.
I couldn’t understand breathing.
And I find my weakness funny, ironic.
That I should be so audacious as to offer these minor heroics, no.
The smell of cigarettes permeates.
And the whole of me shakes and shudders.
If she dies, she’ll be a martyr. But I’d rather she were dead and a martyr, than alive to bother me. We have to earn the answers to the unanswerable, and my belly burns.

Currently, the greatest lamentation of my life is being so trapped by material things.

I am currently Affectionate