Marching into fiction

I am no longer having conversations.
Everything I have to say
will be written as a poem.
I read your fictions
on Monkey Bicycle today
& I was unsurprised
to find they sound like every
conversation you & I have
ever had. Figures. Leave it
to a poet to write fictions
that sound like the poems
he speaks everyday.
I am certain you will
be thrilled to know I'm still
paying attention. I am. Now
you know.

There were your lips
and the vinyl record my mother played
every Sunday, the smoky voiced one.
There was red nail polish seeping
into the frame at the left hand
corner, the plush carpet that may
have been moss, since I can see green
and smell the dampness I remember
from the way your body fell
on leaves that day in September
before I could dream
a hundred ways for you to die.

We start again with your mouth
and I scribble it in my notebook,
before its color and expression fade.
This is what I have been told
to do to understand what I think
of you and your not being here.
But the images move, will not
stay fixed in my mind. I cannot tell
if you are dead or alive, if I can
see or am blind and dreaming.
The world will not stay blurred,
will not separate itself into frames
and paragraphs. There is no cohesion,
no stickiness and everything runs
towards the inevitable end, the blackness
and my forgetting again.

How to be a private eye

First, find a trench coat. Preferably non-descript. Belt it around your waist in a feminizing fashion. Pop the broad collar up around your face and learn to peer into the space between it and the brim of your hat. You must wear a hat.

Second, find a shadow that obscures your face. Preferably one that is frequented by junkies and hookers. Spend hours here, hunching your shoulders around your ears. Take one of the aforementioned hookers into your charge. She should be pretty in a dirty, street-worn way. Smoke your cheap cigarettes furiously, blowing the smoke out your nose like a chimney. Do this until it doesn't burn anymore, until you cannot taste or smell.

Finally, opine narratively to the invisible person who follows you everywhere. Talk about dames and the itch between your shoulder blades. Start referring to your feelings as hunches, as you pull whiskey from your flask and grimace to show your teeth.

Repeat steps one through three until, when you go home at night, you go anywhere but home.

Let's just say that in the brief time that I knew you, you had a profound impact on my feelings towards fatty fish. Other than that, I think there is little notable about our interaction. Oh, and you taught me not to appear as smart as I am because it makes people uncomfortable. I will henceforth pay little attention to what someone is saying to me and pretend that basic math is not one of my strong suits. My social life and cardiovascular system say thank you.

This is just getting ridiculous

Look here. I ordered a deranged cat that would functionally murder any semblance of the social life I currently enjoy. And what did I get? A motor skills challenged high school classmate in my 5:45 yoga class on Wednesdays. There is a reason I have not spoken to this individual since the day we graduated. And his lack of flexibility and miraculously warped sense of balance is extremely distracting when I am trying to focus on my intuition. First the Square, then my block, then my cafe, my restaurant and now my yoga studio? Are you serious?! Please return to sender immediately. I refuse to pay for shipping and handling.