A man sits in a room from which he has erased himself.

He has erased himself from his own life or plans to erase life from himself
and he has reasons.

A man is in his mid-40s and is chubby. His face has grown more sullen and unremarkable.

He has removed himself from his own memories and he is in the process of removing himself from his young daughter's memories.

A man is sepia-toned and vulgar.

He tries to be cold-hearted as he breaks the small bones of the finch, inclining his brow slightly toward the lens.


*


We are called to this world by fierce longing and this is crass. A horrible muddle of "decisions"
traveling between parallel paint lines.

One side says "Yield" and the other, "Careful."

A man took care and takes care of his own needs, albeit sloppily.

He has been drunk for fifteen years, more or less.

A man's daughter has been alive for nearly seven years, more or less.

On mountains there are carvings of busts which mean more men and their heads and shoulders
that look out over things like skies and cumulus clouds and cirrus clouds and orange cats.

A man is inert. On notepads there are etchings etched by a man who, twice removed, can't open
a jar or open a portal or sleep at nights.

For the inert man, the night is a freight car with frequent stops.

A man sees children out the open door of the train and they look like paper doves hanging,
framed against a rain-streaked windowless sky.


*


A man arises at the same time every morning and takes his coffee with sugar and cream.

Six and a half years ago, a man, the same man, rose at the same time every morning and took
his coffee with extra sugar and extra half-and-half.

A man does this in memory of some mornings. The man's girl-child was an infant then.

A man types this 18 inches left of a small plastic rectangular tub of pill bottles.

In the bottles, the orange bottles approximately the color of the fake-wood grain
facade of the desk at which the man sits, are drugs.

The drugs are there to keep him normal.

He isn't normal due to glucose and bad brain synapse firings and an inability
with all things child-proof.


*


A man meditates on failure and self-actualization but doesn't really know what this means.

A man wears a grey hoodie emblazoned, upper chest, with the word "Oregon" in green.

He stole it years ago from his daughter's mother and he wore it in the photograph
his mother loves, the one in which he squats, smiling on the kitchen floor of his then-girlfriend's
tiny student house on a gravel-paved alley during one of the fiercest Oregon winters in recent
history which means "not very fierce" but it was nice to have a bit of snow, and there was a black dog, too.

A man tries to function outside of syntax and sometimes, as a result, he places things.

A man tries his hand at fiction from time to time but always remembers that it's all
been made up already, even the true stuff he's trying to unmake right now.

When the man's daughter was four years old, she said, "What's only useful when broken? An egg!"

A man has broken things; a man is a broken thing; a man is finally good at something but not useful.


*