Don't Trust Men Wearing Masks

I'm not as well-spoken as you remember me.

Having nothing to say, I said nothing a long time. Having nothing to say, I said an awful awful lot.

My shoulderblades used to brut out like coat hangers stuffed in a paper bag.

Among other western garments, I wore my welcome thin.

I've got no sure ear for the vaguaries of speech anymore.

"You talk like a bitch," my cool cousin said.

"You should know," I mumbled, squeaky.

I don’t remember the person I was before, when I was wild and outré, when a few drinks meant waking up in a field or a yard with my pants off and a stash of pocket cash feeling damp and guilty.

Remember when you used to go out drinking and have to pull your friends out of the toilet every Thursday, Friday, and alternating Saturday nights? I was your friends!

My karma smells like the black rings of old stale picnic Oreo cookies.

Sometimes I think that my penis shares attributes with every male character in the Bible, including God.

I've gotten fat and happy which was fine but recently I stopped being happy.

I can't be the only guy grateful for at least a pillow-girlfriend. Can I?

People were witty and funny and charming. Everyone had a truly good time, dancing well, laughing. Some were sitting around inside, others in the moon-drenched half-light of the fire escape. I was alone, intelligent and speechless, confessing my soul to an inkblotch notebook ashamed, accepted by all and yet rejected by my own self.

Blogs are not just for emo kids, Evanescence fans and Russians. That is not this. This is this. I am not me. I am me.

I like to read history books about Russian Wars as if they were psychological thrillers chronicling the factions of my mind.

My sister drives a Buick. Le Sabre.

I like to wake up at 2 am feeling mad and delirious, tasting my succulent dream candy.

I like that online blog pages are sorted calendrically. It makes me feel like a hot drink. Getting better down near the bottom.

What happened a week ago? A year ago, today?

"Oh yeah we've got those," she said smiling matronly as I pointed, squinting to the bright grimy laminated menu. Ready to cry at the slightest vibration. She scribbled on.

I was so fucked up I couldn't even recite the alphabet, let alone remember it!

Like everybody, I just want to get high, once in a while.

The real world is over-saturated with the internet lately. The internet is over-saturated with reality. Where are the ostracized webnerds of yesteryear?

You know those 80 year old men who make the news when they wander off alone in the dark and are discovered miles away from their apartments in Southside trailer parks trying to buy nickel hotdogs from the friendly sketch Mexican ice cream man? That was me at 19.

The smell of the river water air and pine needles sharp. Somewhere yelling, laughter, screaming, running, a radio playing somewhere. If someone had just told me...

I write letters with a flourish of immediacy and then send them just as fast, festering only later in the terror that there is a huge messy person I have inside me always hemming and hawing and when I say too much of anything he gets out and poisons everything.

I've mostly given up on trying to get into bed with women. I wouldn't mind if they took some of my poetry into bed with them though. Or on vacation. Preferably to a Carribean resort.

How's it going, by the way, with you and what's-his-name?

If someone had just warned me that I would wake up one day in a parking lot in Grand Rapids or in the back of a white conversion van on the road to Battle Creek, or Normal, or Bend, or Waukegan, bumping around in a void, there is a window but no sky, no ground, still the rain falls in streaks and I do not pull the blanket farther up around me though it is warm and makes me wish I were back in the womb I came from so far away, because it is also wrapped around her...

Don't you ever want to get born again?

The voice in my head rubs me the wrong way.

"You talk like a bitch," he said.

I said nothing. I tried to think of something else.

It took me many years to realize how difficult I am to live or work with.

My heroes in high school were the guys who could describe in graphic detail the finer secrets of female anatomy from first hand experience.

"What do you mean her lips dangle? She has great lips, a great smile!"

They disregard me smugly. I put on mask.

I woke up from a nap dream. You were in it. It was raining all outside my square apartment. Outside the city was wilderness. Birds swooped down, eating seeds.

I am convinced that I was convinced that mystery is more seductive than truth.

I'm not so sure any more.