Except in moments of absurd concentration when the flashlight ideas insist upon their recognition although only fleeting and the mist clears and the condensation evaporates from the inside of the eyes’ glass all, yes all, combines and conspires to confuse your vagrant boy and lulls him into committing such deeds that before the dust has settled on his victim he is filled with regret and self-recrimination and so feels it necessary to deprive himself of joy for the remainder of the day, even if there are only a few minutes remaining.

Much as I would love to be an influence

(cf. Conversation Coleridge, Frank Frank, Ashes etc.)

I suspect I am also much happier to be influenced

Or under the influence – there is SO much now

To be influenced by. I am awash in what is washing

In waves before my eyes and in the – oh, Hello,

I thought I heard a noise but it was the wind

Blowing harsh realities against the window pane.

Dear Under-Achiever,

Try harder! (Fortune is not your Mistress.)

Yours in the shape of success on stilts,

“The Veiled Boy”

A musical intro to the day, huh?

Huh (Intro)

A musical outro to the day, huh?

Goddess Eyes I

and in between: the day.

Be free of this, free of that, hang out the window

and risk your head, love the unloved, tear the last

page out of the book. Set fire to the sea,

or believe it possible. Sit at the top of the stairs

and don’t let anybody come up unless

they are beautiful and kind and impossible.

Dear Arranger of Flowers,

Do you not realize that to place the crocii behind the lilies is akin to placing the minnow behind the whale for the school photograph? But of course I bow (as do we all) to your long years in the world of flora and fawning. There is (it says in your publicity material, and in the transcript of your divorce proceedings) nobody else living within range of an intoxicating perfume who knows more about where one beauty should stand in relation to another.

Yours in the shape of several futile liaisons,

“The Lost Cause”

When the bed collapsed

it was not a sign of strenuous love-

making but a symbol of all that is

wrong with the world:

spending lots of money doesn’t guarantee satisfaction.

The big band and the throat speckled

The threat threaded and the speaker heckled

I received a note from Chloë yesterday, asking me (in quotation marks and italics) “With a sense of impending doom that it’s all going to end too soon, it’s all too good to be true, where the fuck is the other shoe?” I don’t care for the language, to be honest, but also I have no idea what she’s talking about. Indeed, I don’t know who this Chloë person is. I can only assume the note was delivered to the wrong address.

Flesh into bared and bared as a board

Bed and bored and it’s time to go now