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I'll Not Let You Leave Me Again
Or
Ground Zero
Or
Somthing To That Effect Anyway

I can sit on the porch as long as I want. I can look at the empty driveway for hours on end. I wonder which grease spot is the most recent and from what car it might have leaked. I can pick at things on my body that shouldn’t be there and act like it is something to do, something better than thinking about what won’t go away. I look to the sky and sink low in the grayness. I pinpoint general locations out in the flat expanses and try to guess who might be directly underneath. What is their state of mind and have they remembered that it is up there?

I get up and walk to the driveway and stand in the middle. I can stay here for weeks, if only I didn’t need to eat. No one will need me to move. I hold a bucket in my hand and some ideas upstairs. The bucket is empty, the ideas very much alike. As my mind swirls round the ideas are stuck fast to the bottom gaining mass under the influence of the force. I can smoke if I want but all that is ever left is ashes and butts. If I had a few I would line them up neatly and consider which ends were best suited to make a straight line.

I walk across the street and sit on the bucket in the grass. If blood from my heart leaks down my spine and out of my ass the bucket will catch it. I will need it someday. I look at the house and consider things that have happened behind the windows. I imagine myself appearing in different places, doing the things I do, tending to the life but forgetting why these things are necessary. A car drives by filled with ghosts, nameless, faceless people always around me.

I have chased her around like Pepe Le Pew, love sick and dumb, refusing to believe she is different from me even though the paint washed off her tail early in the hunt. I might turn into a big hairy monster and grab her in my palm. I will hug her and squeeze her and call her George. I might fool her into sitting in my big black pot, atop a fire, both of which would appear from nowhere. I will dance around and sing, chopping carrots into the pot. She will appear to me as food. I have been hungry forever.

I will stand at the peak of a frightening mountain holding a bolt of lightning, and I will be sad when she lies limp in my arms. I could spin really fast and destroy all the things in my way. I would stand and pant, confused, but not knowing better than to stop. I might do nothing at all.

I take my empty bucket and walk back to the house.

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