11:17

you provident monster, you’ve given me something to live for! never have i been so unafraid to die before. i hear the bells are tolling. what’s the most you could take away? what’s the worst you could do! beautiful monster, i’m miles ahead of you. under light-polluted skies, on the skeletons of roofs, on remote pacific peninsulas where all hell’s broken loose…silly monster

i’m light years ahead of you

hey, i know it’s your day, at least according to your passport (never could get the hang of living by two calendars, marking time by two clocks…or maybe i just never tried hard enough) so it only seemed right to break the silence

i interviewed for a job you would have liked, or at least respected, but you were right. that’s not who i am anymore, that’s not really even who i was, i hated myself for lying my way into that box and i made sure they knew it on the way out, now

i’ll never lie my way into anything again

relax, i keep telling myself, you’re invisible. your phone’s been off for days, it can stay off for a few more. breathe, i keep repeating, no one knows who, or even that, you are

(sweet as the summer air, pregnant with rain scent, light as the rustle in the

something pulls me back, though, again and again. doesn’t matter how often i yield or humiliate myself, how invariably i find myself uninvited or ignored. no one here believes i have any right to be here and that’s why i make sure, each time i return, to plant myself where they can see me, and then i

give them everything they ask for

homes, cars, guitars
books, records, cash
months of labor, intellectual
and otherwise

my place at the center of
every circle i’ve
ever)

now, finally, this song

thanks for helping me get it off my chest. i know you’ll say you didn’t do anything—after all, we haven’t been speaking—but you did. you were always there. you still are

trying to think less and speak more. a dramatic departure, given how i spent the last ten years. i don’t count silence, inaction, concealment as mistakes, but they have their limits, and now rising, now stretching, now expressing myself, of all things, is doing wonders for my

heart divorced from thought violates every principle of conscientiousness i was ever taught, but now that my mind’s in order, now that my heart is clean, i don’t see why i shouldn’t babble on and on, why i shouldn’t think about nothing, absolutely nothing, not even the slightest hint of a glimmer of a

didn’t i read this somewhere? maybe in that book you sent me. every day it feels truer, instills me with more resolve. thinking hurts your chances, and i intend to

last
by eleven seventeen