what is the significance? the first person i may have been in love with is getting married, too. i am confused, because i don’t know what’s happening, if everyone is too lonely to go on anymore, if everyone is finding their heart while i lose mine, if we’re just getting to that age. maybe it’s lame to feel alienated by this, but it’s overwhelming because it has been sudden, all of these, all very quick and without my seeing it coming. i am being left behind. it’s obvious. it’s obvious.

it’s not that i’ll die alone. i’ve known.

lords know, if anyone deserves to find these astounding states of being, it’s tim, but if tim has only been in love twice, then that accounts for the tally of letdowns. i’m not blaming. i’m not good within that framework. something that’s glorious and suffocates at the same time.

i search for the significance. maybe there is no significance. chance is a dumb thing.

i’ll level with you. i do not believe in being in love (anymore). i do not believe in the popular definition of love. i do not believe in love, or i see it for its selfish parts. i do not believe in girls and boys for the fun of it. instincts beyond analysis.

that doesn’t mean that i don’t believe in other peoples’ abilities to be in love with each other. it doesn’t mean i’m compelled to feel this way forever out of spite for the establishment, as can be popular. it just is. maybe i have been a poor student with bad lessons.

i believe in boredom and loneliness. i am cynical and vitriolic. i am acid and spite and this is not for you. this is for a pen and paper and the fire that comes a few years later. the significance of feeling/being insignificant. fuck. i am a case. i am a case, alright. i do not want to be around people, anymore, sometimes. i can pretend if i should. my head aches. i am going on a trip soon. i will find a place to go.

the significance of not being me. i will find a place to go.

it is true that i cannot wait to leave, but i catch up on books during my training assignments. it is true that i adapt the style i’m reading for myself and he plays with it for my own purposes, from salinger to chbosky. it’s o.k. as long as i admit it. i only ever hope to entertain nine or ten of you, and i’m wavering in my hopes of even that. i won’t disappoint myself, and no one can crucify me with justified cause. it’s all a safe state of being.

i only like the part of the heart of the day where i stand beside the ship channel that industry destroyed. (they will not dredge it, for fear of stirring up heavy metals and massives of toxins.) the tugboats push barges of sand toward the gulf and the oceanliners take a hull of crude toward the city. on the shore at high-tide are rusty pieces of metal, old tires, lengths of shredded plastics and then maybe a crane or pelican on a rock with sludge on its toes, and the bird will clean its wings like water fleas were its only problem.

if i did, i would smoke a cigarette and when it was a butt i would toss it on the shore. the ship channel’s only hope for beauty is complete ruin. trash and contamination make it reciprocate, now. it has passed to the other side. there is no bringing it back. we wanted new sneakers, or we wanted to microwave our broccoli, such does the water taint with wastes. it is gone forever, and it may as well be beautiful, now.

last night were the bolts of lightning and the tense forces in the dark sky, maybe refused to rain in spite of itself. i accidentally drove beneath that row of arched bridges, one after another, and the universe felt doomed again. i don’t end up with positives much when i’m left to me and my devices. it probably gets old. maybe if you smoked cigarettes you could toss them onto my shore, and i would start to make sense. maybe contamination makes me functional.

sometimes if i am a sap for energy and exhillary, again. if everything happens for their fourth and fifth times. firsts are a batch beneath the sludge of history, or maybe malhistory.

in any case, i hold no fair comparison between something like rainbows and lightning bolts. i sap auxilliary charges, i hide the differential from the bolts whose job it is to take those away and make it all equilibrium again. , again.

incriminate themselves for me.

hark, i hear thunder. , again this evening.

i map the topography. we are in a contest. i am asleep in 156. i will ascend the podium what will i say what will i say and how? why would i want to help the world and hurt myself why would i not want to be selfish what’s it about being nice? if i don’t keep my mouth clean the sores proliferate the big mess upstairs. pestilence the deviant, and his dirty ways through a crowd.

“i ran out of ideas, and i’m sorry for running out of ideas. i am on my own with all of this.

trips like this used to be o.k. i had friends in the program. that was almost three years ago. all of the friends are gone. i try so hard to not go so goth on the inside. the interior surfaces of the eye sockets are caked over with layer upon layer of eye shadow. i am convinced if i miss a chicken dinner, my skin will lose the last few nutrients required for opacity, and i will become a raccoon from the inside out.

this used to be a good place to be alone. it’s shameful to be uninteresting. my spurt is over and there’s nothing left.

i am on that next plane. well, no, not the next plane. but, i am on a plane soon. well, several planes. the first one’s just back home. that’s not the important plane. the important plane is or will be going some where far away. or maybe i should not. it is intimidating to be alone, to go alone. it is intimidating to be alone, even far away. the only bad part about flying is having to come back down to the fucking world. (song title: “wherever i go i’m still me”)

i will be a red face. i will be ashamed of things i’ve done. i will never be ashamed of things i have not done. headturns, circuits pop and fizzle, ah, re-set that eyesight, infiltrate, trudge down the slopes of interior eye shadow, forever nighttime slopes beneath opaque skins, a flashlight topography and a secret way into the brain, jumping circuit boards to open security doors, finding the room and kicking the sides of that glitch until it stops. it will always stop with enough kicking. wonder what the bet is up to, sure that someone else tastes better. what place i can take as used boy meat. perhaps an elle-quiz ideal that just can’t pan out in reality. perhaps really not. 200 words or less as a rule of thumb, to be a boy who’s not so goddamn dumb something fun & different for a little while. gee whiz, ma, nobody ‘preciates.

there is a place we go if we continually refuse to participate. you go there if everyone is doing this or that except you. everyone is doing that except me. the kids play by the pool right outside my door. they squeal sometimes, and a mom shushes them. maybe she saw my light go off twenty minutes ago and she knows i am trying to sleep. maybe she has pierced windowshades and darkness, i am blood and guts at 7:30, even breathing encircling a dream by 8.

“offer up. maybe this is who i am. maybe this is an infinitesimal fraction of who i am. “

“bring it all together, now.” “i can’t” “one for the team” “i can’t” “it used to work so well.” “stop it.” “so fucking past tense.” “quit.” “…” “pity me.” “no.”

“what have i done for you lately, is what you meant to say. what did i forget to dream. why is there an angel at the foot of the bed. why not an angel with a serious gunshot wound. what will i die of. send me an angel is just a shameful 80s tune. when did logics become an interference and a deterrant. how many sit-ups to undermine this belly. why be a leader when i can be a follower. everyone thinks they deserve better but i bet most everyone is wrong. the magazine says that nature’s losing, and it would be nice if half of us were dead and not using up resources, however they do not seem to be asking for volunteers just yet. what can doom mean. how deep does pointlessness go. i’m glad you decided to be my penpal. nobody questions the fact that they never hear back from you, but to be blunt and honest i wasn’t too cool with that. but this is good. thanks. i’m your boy, promise.”