If you had said “ninja,” I might have fallen in love with you.

It's so obvious. Look:
This is cutlass ivy, two-three smoke stack alleyways have come together. Twenty three plus eye-zero plus zero-vee is thirty eight, which is as close as I care to smell. I have to go to work. I have to make eggs, and buy eggs. Have of thirty-8 is seventeen, so then if you add two back in and add the 4 to that...

You're left with 23. It's so obvious. This cutlass is eating itself.

This cutlass is a perpetual sword swallower.

Look: The cat might be a whiny little bitch, but she's right.

I say: bury the cutlass.
The cutlass: a fun new toy.
The cutlass: a fun new way to love someone.

Mother, our mother, my mother told us never
to run with anything sharper than your ear
not to love them.
How do you know what's sharper than your ear?
Imagine I'm eight.
Imagine slicing with your ears,
loving with your slicing.

Turn your ears to plowshares.
Turn the soil with your ears.
We're made of dead things; we should return the favor.
I'm mostly dead things from Nebraska.
Here we go on about burying again, about berrying again.
About floating, with wax berries in your mouth: an unsettling sun.

If your father says "you're dead," you can't listen to him
anymore. You just can't, Sara. You're still so covered
in dirt from your berry picking.
Knock the dirt from your ears. Knock your socks.
Learn how to float, keep the learning just a little bit longer. Your father says
"if I ever find the man...", but he's just mud.

I'm sorry your father's dead, or he will be, or I'll carry his skeleton forever, blinking. Blinking something noble, scrawled in my face, in my jacket, under my desire.

Any fool can scrawl their name up a tree, but it takes a special kind of fool to build pyramids in Nebraska. It takes a special kind of fool to desire a hot sun, or, we're all fooled in one way or another.

I don't know. Maybe your father was right, or maybe he wasn't at all. It just seems like I might need more trees. It seems like I might need endless trees, up trees, up trees. A Winchester Mystery Tree! Wax lips! Wax teeth! and other endless amusements.

I tend to make up amusements. I tend to slice things up like that. I think I got a little bit of real blood on the last one; it's dismembering all these imaginary bodies with my bloody hair that's the hard part. Organizing them. Arms here. Livers here. Toe nails in that corner. How to attack it? One part at a time? One body at a time? Let's make charts and graphs to examine. You do the slideshow; you're better with transitions. I'll be the straight man.

I think there are several men, some women. I think "dying is a part of the process of living" is very zen, but also very much bullshit. It's about realized consequences. You can have as many theories as anyone, but you're still dead. I think dying naturally is when each of the plural me have arrived and expired. Obviously, this is interrupted by motor vehicles and firearms for some people, but I don't know. Maybe not.

I think I'm evaporating by breathing this air. I'd like to think I'm going to leave a mark. I'd like to think I'm going to leave a tree soon. Like I'd fall from a tree and rest up at it from the grass. Damn sure is a big tree. Can't believe I was ever up that branch. Can't believe I'm here and breathing now.

The air all feels about the same after a bath. All you really want to do is smell nice as long as possible; to see if you can make it to the next tree still smelling like apple blossoms. It's tough to argue with smelling nice, with that cute thing you do with your nose, with chewing gum. I wish you'd stop smoking. Stop burning when you don't drink.

Let's try something new with glasses. Try a different arrangement, if you will. Something more comfortable than a one-bath-room-no-bed-room-tree. Take some kerosine and an lens. Make a clear spot for resting knees, knees, knees, and coming home to. Don't you worry about my blind eye; it's been like that for years.

Like this house, for instance. Do you think it remembers how it used to be so many living things? Every strand of wood muscle fiber is taciturn, curled into this living room shape, this kitchen shape, this had to keep warm shape. Clearly, a failure. Clearly, a wax pyramid, shorter and wider every summer. This is how life is.

I used to think my home was a safe tree. Now I know the difference, and I make plans to escape at night. I make plans to fling my body between every tree in the neighborhood. Sleeping in parking lots, waking up to the no longer hum of the lights of dawn, grease on my cheek, gravel pressed into my ear fold, the smell of gasoline in my hair, the dull ache in my hip.

After all, 'the fuck would I want a regular coke for, when I can have one with cherry?