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My ups and downs never stop on the hump we call a hill behind the house.

The thing was, I didn’t care what I ate in front of a woman. Every day, I told her things I would have been too embarrassed to tell anyone else.

I can’t struggle against joy and suffering inseparable.

Teddy, the new sous chef, is on fire again. It’s the second time in a week. I make a silent promise to myself never to have sex on a beach, not even with Ryan Gosling.

He probably had an order. Ludes, Dexis, Black Birds—who knew.

We’re all trying, in our own ways, to parse what we may have done wrong.

The clown has taken a seat at our veranda table in absolute silence.

Try to make order in one direction, and things shoot off in another.

I was nineteen and mentally infirm when I saw the prophet Isaiah.

My imagination has been weak lately, caught in some half-world.

The sight of her belly ring and the smooth, tight canopy of flesh.

You might say I acted on instinct. All I wanted was to stop the screaming.

I know what my promises are worth, know the worth of material things.

For eight weeks no one heard my voice for eight weeks no one slept.

Collage what we can, form fractured and repaired, blend of is and isn’t.

My first memory is the day of mourning after John Lennon died.

All night, rain from the distant past. I sometimes waken as a child.

The wind was like a girl sobbing out her story of betrayal to the stars.

Emil was busy applying his anger therapy, and it was working.

Sometimes the old men held their fishing poles like divinations.

I see a young ZZ Top smiling, eyes darting from my shirt to my beard.

Here they were, two surviving soldiers from opposite sides.

We left our lives behind us as fast as the Beemer’s zero to sixty.

The boy imagined his dead grandfather haunting the world.

I think of each story as a big circle that’s all around me and I’m in the center.

Truth, it seems, spills from movies and sitcoms in the wires’ wake.

All my life I have noted that my thinking was atavistic, totemic.

Up there there’s not a sound except for the wind and the buzzing of bees.

Three rooms, sight unseen, rented from a nurse and her husband.

Years after the Sisters of the Holy Names left you unlock the door.