i like the the colour of raspberries on white kitchen counter tops. or the inside of orange peels, left discarded on those green picnic tables in june. i find something curious about women smoking cigarettes on film and this acts inability to transfer its attractiveness over into reality. there are so many more things i'd wish to tell you, like how she wrote that note which i found in our sheets, she said it was for me but i knew it was not and all these kids bitch and moan about being alone, but what's worse is trusting someone else with your happiness. i have not fallin' asleep sober in seven months (it washes away those dreams that used to keep me up) but that is not to say i am unhappy, i just refuse to give up these wonderfully calm nights to those empty meaningless memories. but your heart is a million times safer to hide these thoughts than hers ever was, and a beauty which she had lost long ago holds itself in you tenfold. you remain to remind.

this man.

he was growing into middle age, and was living then in a bungalow on woodland avenue. he installed himself in a rocking chair and smoked a cigar down in the evenings as his wife wiped her pink hands on an apron and reported happily on their two children. his children knew his legs and the sting of his beard against their cheeks. they didn't know how their father made his living, or why they so often moved. they didn't even know their fathers name. he was listed  in the city directory as thomas howard and went everywhere unrecognized, lunching with kansas city shopkeepers and merchants, calling himself a cattlemen or a commodities investor. someone rich and leisured with the common touch. he had two incompletely healed bullet holes in his chest and another in his thigh. he was missing the nub of his left middle finger, and was cautious lest that mutilation be seen. he also had a condition that was referred to as granulated eyelids, and it caused him to blink more than usual, as if he found creation slightly more than he could accept. rooms seemed hotter when he was in them, rains fell straighter, clocks slowed, and sounds were amplified. he considered himself a southern loyalist and guerrilla in a civil war that never ended. he regretted neither his robberies nor the seventeen murders he lay claim two. he had seen another summer under in kansas city, missouri, and on april third, in the year 1882 he was thirty four years old. after eating breakfast, he, along with his companion bob ford, prepared to depart for a robbery. they went in and out of the home preparing their horses, dodging his gleeful children who were lost in games under the warm morning sun. he removed his coat as the day grew hotter, and unbuckled his gun belt, lest the firearms made him appear suspicious. before leaving he glimpsed a dusty picture on their living room wall, he stood on a chair to reach the portrait, and bob ford fired one final shot into the body of jesse james entering the back of his head and killing him instantly.

i tap my fingertips against the wall which shelters my little world inside my apartment and think of things to write about. what the fuck do i know, what the fuck do you want to hear from me? do you want me to tell you that i'd go sober for you, because i swear i would. i wouldn't touch a drop (nor would i want to) and we could work on the nicotine addiction. but maybe i just miss when we were kids and kisses on the cheeks was all we needed to show each other our i love you's, when we dreamed up stories in our heads and bought cheap candy and pop, lost in those late weekday nights in the summertime. before these clothes became our caskets and all the kids switched to cocaine, because whiskey never mended our minds. i remember when your lips tasted like cherry chapstick and vanilla ice cream, before we melted them into cheap wine and wrapped them around even cheaper cigarettes. i have this small intangible memory of the night when we knew things had changed forever. when we huddled our little frames together in the parking garage across from the royal albert arms, smoking john players between bands feeling oh so punk. we kissed and smiled and laughed but i knew that you would never taste like that cherry chapstick again.