I Dream of You Coming Back Every Night Since the Morning You Left or Window in a Cheap Apartment Building

I was a hot mess
the morning you left
and the chill of the morning
crept in through the door
and the music was still playing
soft guitar
and piano
and heavy-handed metaphor
and I felt like I'd been there before
the déjà vu made me shiver
or was that a draft from the window?
I'll never know.

Sob

I mean to say I am, I mean, to say I am, I mean to say I am man of woman of love of man and woman of man and woman and love of man and woman and I mean to say I am mean man to woman's means of love of man of man and woman and, say, woman to man's means, am I to say I mean I am man or merely means?

Huck it All

The only way to leave Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with a sense of satisfaction is to know exactly what you are getting yourself into and then read it from cover to cover. Otherwise, the book seems to be ridden with shortcomings and oddities. The book is not perfect by any means. Twain would probably be the first to say that. But what it tries to do, it does well. It successfully navigates the tumultuous and treacherous path that a writer must take, that gap of water over rock and silt and mud where “you can't tell the shape of the river, and you can't see no distance. It got to be very late and still, and then along comes a steamboat up the river” (131). And just out through the fog the whole damned country is burning down so that all you hear are boat horns and screams masked with fife and drum. These sounds, though, can't be covered with triumphant music. They're sounds that drop through your body like a rock through water, breaking not just the meniscus but every layer they encounter until they make ripples in the marrow of your bones. You start shivering and a rivulet of sweat, disguised as a tear, beads on your bottom lip. That’s when you realize you’re about to miss the chance to do something remarkably different. Lucky for us, Twain, through Huck, knew just what he was doing: "I dived—and I aimed to find the bottom, too, for a thirty-foot wheel had got to go over me, and I wanted it to have plenty of room" (131).

Two Steps Forward, One Step Left

Burning through life with a voracious mix of passions and an earnest compassion for those around him, he doesn't test the waters, he drinks them down and chases them with breathfuls of Northbird.

In a deep V-neck he hugs you, shakes your hand, pats your chest, wrestles the ball from your kung-fu grip, orders you a pizza, turns the light off and leaves his music on.

One mile later, two years after, three beers down, four bowls in, five assists, six points, seven rebounds, eight takedowns, nine knockouts, ten Japanese crab kills, twelve step program, sixteen chess pieces and though two are knights, only ours is Knight.

Simon

In walks a beard in old, tattered clothes babbling about basketball and asking for the pipe: "Ya mind?" he says and picks up a lighter from the table, draws in a huge breath and, while exhaling, remarks: "The world is yours, man. You just have to believe in yourself." Minutes tick by as he tells detail after inane detail about stories that are too specific for anyone to relate to and all revolve around some vague, overarching theme to which he's alluded. Wanton in both focus and reaction, he hasn't finished talking when my roommate asks him to pass the piece. Slowly turning the knob and resistant to simple good-byes he steps out leaving us all wishing he'd stayed only a little longer.

Earthmovers

Machinery woke me up today. It didn't startle or jar me from some deep slumber; it slowly and painfully pulled me from sleep like a band-aid from a reluctant boy's knee. I looked outside and what was, a few short weeks ago, a house beside my apartment building is now a hole. They'd knocked it down already. That took about a day. Then they cleared the debris. That took about a day. Then they abandoned it for a couple of weeks, until today. Now a hole sits where a home once stood. It got me up, at least.

Waken

It was grey and I woke to the sound of car tires lifting water from the road like marine vessels tearing through the tide. Sticky notes pervaded my bedside table and clothes conquered the floor. Bob Dylan told me that God was on my side, and my roommate got high. And I, six days short of twenty-two, thought of Odysseus: away for so many years on the raging oceans, seeing new things and finding himself in situations of peril he'd not imagined before. And I, laying alone in my bed, thought of a girl I know.