I do kind of.

Drafty at the driftwood rooms for scorned suitors where one cannot be too careful not to step in daffy. Simulating from the discomfort of a desktop indoors the experiences of real life campfire and camaraderie. Memories drift in on the tide, oh the tide, yes the tide, ancient in a comparative way of the word, dog willing. Dogsbody’s body. This is what these shores are for.

Here is a recollection: a red skirt. Only it was yellow. Maybe cans of Dr. Pepper, maybe Bali Shag tobacco and pretenses that dissolved when we looked too closely, we looked away. It’s gonna take a hurricane to get me off the ground. Yeah, what the drifter said.

What drifts in in fits like flot and jetsam drifts out in pieces charred, afloat to be chewed forgotten. Wolf’s head, Wolf’s jaw, its watery ways.

Maybe there were long lines at the Greyhound station.

I don’t remember why it stopped being so important to remember, what let me let the driftwood be drug at last to its watery grave. I do remember that it took four years.

Perhaps my present grief will require as many. Three years to go, can I bear it?

I spoke to my father over the phone he said he’d sent an e-mail to my former partner telling him he’s welcome to visit our family’s cabin any time, god how embarrassing happy father’s day k thx bye. More than embarrassing, worse, the ache startled up from slumber somewhere in my spleen, or heart, or elsewhere, startled upwards to trip through my wires in a flash I was weak-kneed recalling dumbly a story of nevermore, best buried like its predecessors.

Fold up the chairs fold the hands fold the laundry, fold myself neatly so neatly I fit into a drawer and there hide.

This too shall pass
This too
This too shall
This shall pass too

This shallow pass too narrow at times even cut off from itself where trees have bowed to things bigger than trees, winds stronger than any I’ve left in me to brace and be courteous, accommodating, accepting. To be good. Bright-sided and uncomplaining I have braved to be of late, but how brave is it to be when it’s not me, when I contain multitudes and wish to contradict, contradict myself.

Love is a political beast with jaws for a mouth I don’t care.

I said I always admire best those folks who are unselfconscious, unapologetically themselves, who determine their individual boundaries distinguished easily from corsetish limitations the so-called civilized world would impose. Jedi mind tricks only work on the weak-willed.

So if in imitation of the brave and unashamed folks of the world I were to check my self-consciousness at the door, I would say that was the shittiest accidental run-in I’ve ever had to smile-seethe my way politely through.

Three years to go. I wonder if we’ll ever be friends. It seems some lines have been drawn in the sand and I said to myself, last summer, don’t worry it’s sand, we can redistrict. Only we never have and that sand is looking so much like stone I fear to touch it.