"The Times" First Draft (Annie's Version)

Remember when you were Crazy?

Remember when everyone adored you?

Remember when you told me all women love giving blow jobs?

Remember when you insinuated that you got offers?

Remember when you made me wear a hair-shirt

For a year,

Not wanting you near,

Because I’d been forced

As a matter of medical course,

To terminate what I thought would be

Our Baby:

A family.

Remember how sick I was those six weeks?

No, you don’t.

You weren’t there;

Just like your father,

Left you without a fucking care.

Were you still looking for him

At the 7-11,

Searching for Marlboros,

Only to find a starving uroboros?

And you fed into it.

Remember how my Catholic father,

And how, after you made it clear you couldn’t be bothered,

Had to take me to the hospital and wait

For the grandchild that would arrive late?

Remember not telling me about the naked sexts your best friend’s wife sent you for years?

Remember

Lying

To

Me

Every

Goddamned

Day

About

Every

Goddamned

Thing.

I don’t regret fucking another in my bed

While you melted into your couch.

I don’t regret love at first sight.

I don’t regret the secret messages

You wrote to women on social media,

Telling them we broke up,

Because I was “boring”

Besides, according to

you

i

Was

Old News

Long forgotten,

Nothing in common,

And it was hell.

So.

Here I am, back at the inkwell,

Ready to report just the facts, ma’am;

Ready to give away your tell.

Best fold that losing hand, man.

Add this biography to your exhausting excuses:

It’s all on me, why you refuse to move.

Hot damn, Ace, these circulating presses

Got me in a New York Groove!

Enter Lilith, here to smudge the black

Of your quarter century of lies:

The truth

Of our

Youth.

To Lilith's surprise,

I stole her prize:

Rosemary's Baby.

And, Baby,

He's of the demons that spit back.

This is merely chapter one:

This ain’t your patented one-and-done.

Your silver webs will come unspun

Erasers set to stun.

And,

Maybe,

Finally,

I’ll remember,

What it was like to love the sun. 

A Daisy

Time melts and drips

Like Dali’s clocks,

And watches.

From college greens

And the stairs outside

The English building

To your arms twisted

Around me, in the sheets

And christ, I miss that heat,

The feel of you,

Your desire for me,

Curtailing my prattling

With your kissing

Those lips belong on mine

Like red uncorked from wine

I miss the two of us being

Afraid of Virginia Woolf together

And endlessly seeking Flannery’s Jesus

Jesus

How we clicked and curved and fit

I’ll never remember the story we

Made up at dinner that night 

But I think about it all the time

And how that older couple

Stopped to tell us

How happy we looked.

But two Misfits will never fit. 

Watching you walk away

Through the waist-high rye,

A golden tear of goodbye

Slipped the horizon and

I remembered Dylan

And fought the sunset.

You forgot your mitt,

You couldn't catch them,

At the bottom of the canyon,

But I heard you cry

As they fell one by one,

"Here's lookin' at you, Kid."

Untitled Unfinished New Fiction

On my name, every word I’m about to tell you is the truth.

They will lie and tell you I’m sick, delusional, pathological: mental.

They will mislead you.

Robert Frost found two paths in a wood, then whittled it down to a choice; the duality of man, what’s right versus what’s easy. Syrupy shit like that. I read that poem and thought, “That’s a man without foresight or ambition. I can find 10 to 20 paths, well-tread or virgin, in any given forest. He should’ve kept looking.”

Trust no one but the anonymous.

*****

The first one was a fluke. Usually, one has practiced the art before attempting a masterpiece, handled all of the instruments, come to know them intimately, breaking them in with a fierce yet familiar every day embrace; they have rubbed the flames of Crimson Red between their palms until it melted into their life line, their heart lines, the M.C. Escher swirls and spirals of their thumbs, held their hands up to God and wept at his generosity, thanked Him till the oil turned dry…

So many colors. So many options, choices, weapons, gifts, cuts, bandages, gingham dresses, oil-stained Levi’s, bouffants and toupees, the snap-click of the heels of her shoes, the smart wingtips he wears to the office, the ability to live or die whenever one chooses, to be torn between eating ice cream or a salad and choosing the ice cream. Our open hands have been filled by His ever-open hand: the world is sweet and sharp, muddy, crystalized into perfect ponds of ice, toxic, kind, jealous, and unforgiving, and He offers this to all of us, every day.

But art, is, of course, subjective. Some look at a Rothko and see a square. Critic So-and-So will carefully and eloquently tongue lash a Basquiat for being too ethnic, as the racists like to say. Others look at Da Vinci and see mathematical equations that add up, some small, invisible scaffolding constructed by the eyes to direct the gaze up, down, all linear and vertical, yet all angles and curves, a swift dash across the horizon line, and these solutions make sense: they are the sum of us. 

The Lion and the Bear (Flash Fiction)

Do you know why Mother Nature eats the weak pups of the world? Because she’d rather be one with her child than to risk watching them die. I am the lioness feeding on her precious runt. I am the brown bear in the spring, launching at predators. I am Mother Nature and he was my sun. He was my son, goddamn you. 

Pine Needles

 I’ll bet she makes a beautiful bride,

And brings out all the best in you:

The fooler fooling another fool.

My ruler is crueler, so let's unspool

More than a quarter century defied.

Let's take one last meandering ride

Looking for the crash site:

You're the liar

I'm the writer

Let the professor take you to school.

I hope she ends up your fool

A fool who’ll make a fool of you.

We never said a word about

Your pathology of my doubt:

Your misdiagnosis

Became my prognosis

And I died in the dual.

I’ll always be your ghoul,

Your biggest mistake,

Your deepest regret,

The one you see across

The empty room.

I don’t know

If I want

For you

To move on

Or

Pine

Like the trees in 

Your backyard that whispered

Thick secrets

In the humid

Gulf breeze,

Yet it reminded me of

Fall:

Of when my heart pumps adrenaline

Manic fireflies, cool cigarettes,

Just enough chill

To get

A guy

To wrap me

In his flannel,

Smile kindly,

And make me regret

Every

Fucking

Second 

With

You.