My latest darkness is about love.
I don’t remember what I was going
to say. Except PARTNER. Then
coming up cold with your own
decision (i.e., counting with a
hand, counting with a foot, etc.).
I’m reading through the 1st few
pages. I’m cold. I’m so COLD.
I keep looking around for the pur-
ported cruising, after the purported
hotness. I do not seem to be see-
ing or feeling any of it. Just coffee &
tea with no cream or additives. So I
move to San Francisco where it’s
always a month before the bubble
bursts (one hand plus one foot)
and a cold evening with one more
episode of Paris Hilton. With Paris
I find myself, usually with butterflies
and birds. This time it’s an epiphany
of BLANK. I conjure a life-size
cardboard cut-out, this bold blank
vision, a representation of Paris
in the flesh, how far it goes beyond
representation. Weeks pass. It appears
as fact with no further effort from me,
my clairvoyance capacitated into the
cardboard flesh of a cut-out reality,
right in my very own living room at a
‘surprise party’. It’s my 38th birthday
but there is no surprise, of course. She
even and also lives in my television
all day long. With the waif of a crooner
who’d burned holes into my eyeballs
with a voice that defied airwave infinity
in the 1980s. For an entire decade, ghosts
of his descendants blankly cruised each
farm where pigs were bred in Alma, Ark-
ansas. It’s the Summer of Love. I’m del-
ivered 13.7 miles away by a drunk doctor.
