Beery Afternoon:
Out by the creek with a magazine, alongside tall grass, plastic goose, empty beer bottle, pink ball, a rain-split book of nursery rhymes. Can I still sit cross-legged? I can. To be near what flows. Throbs below the soil. Or moving here before, after, moving now. I mean to say boredom is resignation, just waiting to go scouring down. They say blood isn't really red. And those hybrid cars—with their humming hiss—will kill everyone crossing the street, in the parking lots, who never hears them coming. Everything good is bad, a little, and I fling my magazine into the creek. I enjoy the word flutter. Also circumvolution. Here breathes a casual sin or some rightful reincarnation—I do not know. On a fence, like Pete and Repeat, only this time Pete holds tight.... I want to phone a grown woman named Mary. But of course I can't.
Department Meeting Afternoon:
Sweet, dry thoughts. When I say sweet I mean like habanera, painful. When I say dry I mean I will die with wants unfulfilled. When does this finally leave? Or: why did I take two Xanax with black coffee at noon? (I still have it together. I do.) A nose stud as exponentially more mysterious than half-hidden tattoos. The little seed is still there, inside my heart or spleen. When I say seed I mean I might go crazy, so don't act surprised the following day, don't say mysterious ways, or I never saw it thrumming. Is there a motion on the table? Is there a motion? I second that motion. My future resting greenly in your eyes. Intensive primary color lips. Glass-like is your skin, glass-like is the way I see through, off that ordinary painting on that ordinary wall, corner and corner...we adjourn.
Preparing Dinner Early Afternoon:
Oil, vegetables, a pinch of salt. I drink red wine from a coffee mug. While I shower, my wife pulls the receipts from my wallet, and returns them. Reads all my emails (she breaks into both accounts routinely). Once she found and hid my marijuana, which was brilliance: to even notice its absence was to claim responsibility. The sweet odor of sautéed onions. My wife calls to say she'll be home at nine, not six. I finish the wine. The cool ceramic against my bottom lip, that's why. I want to have an interior journey, I do; but need to first begin an exterior journey. What does that mean? Wasp at the window, thud and hum. Or I lean at the cliff's edge, peering over. Or simply tinnitus, an inner ear. Oven buzzer—it's done.
The Afternoon Mary Calls Me:
Garbled words...hissed. No, no, whispered.