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Now is when I shall start drinking. At the beginning of the age when I must be serious…I gave it up when I was sixteen, and now I shall come back. I also quit smoking six months ago, but now I shall start that again, too.

Burnt myself in the bath tonight. Andy came by with some piss-poor flowers, slightly tipsy from a bar I’m too young to get into, let alone money lacking. He mentioned that he loved my feet and hair, that it had always been so for him, this moonlight on my face. Andy kissed me, shoving me onto the couch in some fantasy that I like it rough. He moaned into my breasts and then whispered "Annie, oh Annie." Then I ran the bath as hot as I could and got in right away. Now the skin on my toes is blistering, peeling back, lobster caught masturbating red.

The stoplight called my name in the street one day. "Una, come over here." I was walking down the sidewalk, daydreaming of blonde pixie children, and so thought I had imagined the voice, or perhaps spoken out loud to myself. Fearing embarassment, I quickened my pace and then suffered a heart attack from years of overindulgent potato chip eating.

That’s when I realized that it had not been my imagination. I could see the stoplight clearly, though all I really heard was the death roar. The pavement slipped some braille under my fingers and I read "We are speaking in code now, dear. Ignore your silly ideas about inanimate objects."

One night, the refrigerator door jammed. I couldn’t believe it. It was no special night and I was neither hungry nor especially emotional. There was, however, some cold miso leftover from breakfast that had been quite a bit tasty.

I’d never had a refrigerator door jam on me before.

A mirror talks only when it is drunk, which is when you are sober. Be careful to face a mirror without something (a drug) in your blood stream. It tells horrible truths, worse than the lies it whispers when you are on crank for the third day straight. It tells you how ugly your parents are, how you were unable to escape and never will your own genetics, and how you are a cruel person to even think of passing these genes on to your possible, as yet unlikely children.

If you must face a mirror absolutely sober, do so with great humility. Don’t look yourself straight in the eye, but also avoid the tricky double reflections that allow you to see how crooked your face truly is.

Fighting with a refrigerator is a terrible idea. It has stored up noxious food smells from items you allowed to go bad for years. If you live in an apartment and it is an old apartment and it is not your own refrigerator, prepare to die or at least realize you will never like kitchens again. It emits all the smells at once just as one foot is planted neatly against the bottom of the fridge, just below the door and the other is stretched out in a back lunge position your gym teacher in high school would have been appreciative of if she hadn’t been eyeing your girlfriend, and both of your hands are wrapped white knuckled around the door handle. Now, you are not an idiot, you are expecting the door to come loose at any moment and you are ready to leap back to avoid rubber banding yourself against the dirty cupboard doors you have yet to clean since you’ve moved in. However, you are not expecting your refrigerator to fart.

Offer the mirror a drink. Some bon -bons. Read it some Oscar Wilde, or better yet, some Charles Bukowski. Wear red lipstick. Pretend to speak German. Purse your lips, suck in your cheeks, and do your best Hedy Lamarr. "He buy me lotsa pretty bangles and don’t beat me much."

Tandalayo is your hero. She was wickedly sexy and dumb and conniving, and everyone knew and she still got laid. You in your sweet honesty and bitter lies and fat calves have no bruises but also no hungry eyes.lips.cock.cunt.

Eat well. Sleep well. Don’t make those rules. Be imperative. Write letters to your friends describing world issues so they won’t ask if you’ve been going to school or getting laid.

When it is getting good, you have got to be careful. A few too many good lines, a bright day, when your thighs don’t touch…these are all warning signals of impending disappointment. Most men I know require only two things: satisfying sex and something they’re damn good at. If a man is getting those things, he is irresistable.

I remember you in the mountains with your walls up and my clouds up and our heads down.

I want to call you when anything happens that doesn’t involve sex.

I fell in love with your voice before I could shoot you in the face.

This is life well documented. This is the time when I abstain from protocol and lean in with my cleavage bunched up.

A good writer is ashamed to share, but confesses like a petty crook minus an alibi. Woodrow W. Smith was right: wash your hands, you frikkin’ pervert.

If I was a lady pirate, I’d wear gold hoops large enough for parrots on my man’s dick.

Printer, o printer, wherefore art thou? I am drunk and cannot find my words.

Having it all is having something to lose and being happy about it. Got my cat and flowers and gin and bathtub and bathrobe and thick thighs and bed and candles and gin and gin and gin and a laptop.

Jimmy was my first love. He could swing higher than any other little boy, even though his legs were short. He had ‘termination, as his daddy said.

He lay me down to the sound of their chattering and I couldn’t hear my own tears for the smell.

In the dream airport, you must be careful to watch your luggage and avoid the sinister men with the hornrimmed glasses. Freud and Nietzsche are after you, remember. Alligator leather is a sure sign of effeminate behavior while hemp marks you as brainless. Keep your eyes straight ahead, don’t allow the crispy clean children begging to deter you from boarding. Get on that plane. If you head to the wrong terminal, you will dream of fucking in bed next to your father, you will dream that he is jealous. The final destination is a temporary motherlode of anxiety, fear, prophecy. Don’t wake up into someone else’s nightsweat. There are no goblins, dwarves, evil sprites hunting around in the dark with filibrous nets trying to steal your dreams. It is only your fat neighbor’s blundering in the line ahead of you. Make you sure he doesn’t grab your ticket.

Ally’s feet scraped on the rug, her pretty mouth forming a kitten’s mew as she began to cry. "Hush Ally. I haven’t time for your performances today. We must get back to Boston." The blonde pixie clammed up her face and stopped breathing in protest to her mother’s inattentiveness. The busy woman didn’t notice when Ally turned fuchsia and then flew away.

Inside the house was a strict coldness that wouldn’t let up. There was no way to bargain with it, no matter how many cups of tea you made, or socks you put on, or how high you turned up the thermostat. With Gabriel’s fat, there was no need for heat. He would have suffocated with a scarf on. His dancing partners, all large giraffes, would chatter as quietly as they could while they waited for their waltz. Their spots clenched at the end of each tune, hoping to be the next dancer, the next prancer, the Baryshnikov of neck.

Slowly strumming the guitar. Slowly running your hands through my hair. It was long then, cascading black curls, turned to frizz in heat or rain. Our bed was in the back of a house, we lived with a walrus banshee and her tadpole brothers.

We made love every moment we were together, our conversation was always filtered through my moans. Uninhibited, happy, covered in our sex excretions for hours. We were shiny then. Enthusiastic.Out of bed, I tried to sing to you, but there was that infernal computer in the corner and it was as if you couldn’t communicate and write code at the same time. You had two lovers, and eventually the one with the most chips won.

The sour pit spit in my stomach, the desperate dry probings of tongue in my mouth. Hunger, slight. Malnourished wrinkling body. Who am I and why am I lost? Suffocating mouth. He is soft, squelching jello in my hands slippery soft not coming. There are no parts written for me anymore. I have the sneered look of a second rate actor at sixty. What’s left but the drink? If we never got started, I never finished. The suck suck machinations of others left me cleaned out, you envelop me. Stinking sweating, this is all the communication we require. I don’t have to question if we’ll do this tomorrow. We’ll do this as long as we want to, and meanwhile, there is always the word.

Sunrise, a cerulean blue dream that we canceled a return ticket for. I knew we should kiss then, and I knew that we didn’t want to. I am so used to being separate from you that the idea of harboring your tongue in my dreams, held against the roof of beauty is the moral that lacks substance. Holding a spitfire babe, holding all those melodies you played on the guitar, every boy that you are. My sun is born more than three times your brilliance is bent. Change hop, continue to hold please. We will be lifting off when your thumb slips against the pea.

They are all laughing, they like me, this is good, it is great and I am a champion. Can’t beat first time luck nor success. Why measure up when you can’t keep building? Leave the inch counting to others. When I was stuck to four wheels pushed by hand, I had a comfortable view of human nature. It’s easy to antagonize from disability. Selling selling selling biting the insides of my mouth to temper blood with money.

You clattered on the keyboard until you realized I was naked in your bed. Then you slept on the floor. You have never wanted to give anything easy. So I ignored you and continued to be naked throughout the night until you gave up and slept next to me, and when you awoke…you couldn’t help it. I was comfortable and not expecting nor even entirely desirous of you. That’s what turns you on, the bimbo hater you are. You have to feel like the lucky underdog, the one that won’t get chased after, but will get some. The ringing in my ears from this revelation is remarkable. I couldn’t have gotten you years ago and been more miserable but for my ignorance. Right, hindsight is the bliss that no matter, it is over. No missed chances for me.

If Juno had a balcony he would sing down your pants. Let the fly unwind gently, more than my clumsy fingers, farther and ever tantalizing. We would hit the honeypot, the subculture of the back seat where dirty thoughts have been born since the very first Tin Lizzy. And when I go crazy, I will be alone with dusty vinyl memories, mummified remains of the fantasy.

You have always been the most fluid, the most graceful, the most enchanting as you are leaving. I am halting. I say goodbye easily by mouth and my heart moves over the sunset.

Checking out the river remark in the rearview mirror, we can keep sailing on the highway with blackbirds on the telephone wire. Singing old spirituals. You can call me every stereotyped dirty name in your pacifist vocabulary, but you know Malcolm really had it. You know he tapped our true nature. Are we stuck, immovable?

Hunger is a loud invader. King George rules my head space and my lovely tongue goes sour in want.

Tiptoeing through your memory I go. I leave earthquakes in my wake.

Supersonic sound drifter riding in the car, challenging the white birds in the hazy air. We are getting tropical in this heat, growing rare plants in our armpits, when we open our mouths it is the blooming of heady sex smells. Pressure is consistently building with the sun’s rising, we gasp and moan, building steam through the wheatfields. Laying gentle hands, gentle as women can be, we bloom out of our creases, bees encircle and guard the vehicle, the clouds drop down thousands of jewels to dazzle our tongues, bringing a foreign spice of mildew to the buds.

Okay. Take care. Buh bye.

Lips work feverishly against each other, the tongue asks for the next dry hit of death. "Come and get me you bastards!" cries the teenage rebel of every body organ. If we withdraw from the world entirely, we die. We live only in choosing the quickest way to death, and that in the embracement of every enjoyable thing to do here on earth.

It is in the middle of July that Reese visits me. She is idle out of school, her chicken scratch letters every other month do not match her now languid pace, anymore than her soft arms fill out my own shirts. She is even smaller than the year before, she has picked up smoking with the other girls and I miss her haysweet scent.

The blue room sees through her skin, makes her pale cheeks shimmer as if laden with tears.

There are only fragments of my ol’ girl left.
