13 Ways of Looking at Obscenity
by Trevor Dodge
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She shucked the corn, spilling its silk into a brown paper sack balancing itself on the floor at her feet. The woman woman followed her lead.
“He won’t even discuss it with me,” she said. The other woman bent her cheeks into a frown but said nothing. “He probably even wrote it into the fucking will, I’ll bet.”
The other woman held the positions and muscles of her face. “So…you can’t ever again, really?” she finally said.
“Nope.”
“Never?”
“Nope.”
“Jesus.”
“Not him, either. Not a single touch.” She chuckled and the other woman followed her lead.
“But that’s just…mean,” she finally said.
She smiled. She didn’t know what else to do.
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Little Orson was told from the time he could remember being told things that he was a genius. His mother repeated this nearly every day and because his father didn’t correct her, he said it nearly every day as well, only in slight nods and looks that weren’t as stern as they should have been. When he was nine, Little Orson slowed from hearing these things and when he was 10 it stopped completely. That’s when he ran away with his sister and worked the streets for money. The rest, as they say, is history.
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The child works the tiny screws into their threaded tunnels, one at a time, pinching them with a thumb and index finger, held fast by the fingernails, drop just one more no more, swivels for the tiny screwdriver and fastens the hinge by turning and turning slowly, careful not to strip the metal or flange the plastic, careful not to bend the arms too far back, careful not to crack or smear or scratch or dent or bend or damage in any perceivable way, no matter the cost. The child learning what it means to be an adult.
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The professional athlete, the person who gets paid to play, took the game ball home and wrote on it in big loops with a permanent marker. The professional athlete, the person who gets paid to play a team sport, sealed the game ball away in a special room with hundreds of other game balls written on in a similar fashion with a similar instrument. The other professional athlete, the person who no longer gets paid and no longer plays a team sport, unlocked the room one game ball at a time and auctioned each off to the highest bidder. That professional athlete—that one—had never felt such joy.
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He’d had a few before he got home that night. She was watching television but not really watching, her laptop balanced on her legs, fingers clicking and swiping across its molded plastic form hinged open in front of her and glowing. He made a move on her and she responded. He made another move and she responded to that one as well. She closed the device with a thin snap and stood up; she smiled and walked in front of him and he followed her and this is how it all ended. Except the next move was hers, the both of them naked, her hand there, and he did not respond. She made another move with another hand on another there and he did not respond. When she stood and reached for her clothes he finally responded, but not that way. But this way: the end.
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It was purely electronic. They agreed to never meet in person, conducting their romance totally in bits and bytes, framing their world one email, one text message, one status update, one profile pic, one like at a time, an intricate weave of emotions they would never express inside the same physical space. Their world became The World and everything else atrophied. A beautiful mess.
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The father orders the granite one, the one with custom laser etching, and chooses a picture of her holding a teddy bear she was handed to hold by the minimum wage photographer at Sears. She never loved the bear and the father never loved her. Not really, anyway.
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She lassoes him around the waist, on purpose, so her arms are out of the way.
"Really."
No reply. Wide stare.
"I want you to."
He thinks his thoughts while she watches him think. She doesn't quite get it.
"Don't make me beg you."
No reply. Wider stare.
His eyes roam the rumpus room, scurrying along the felt of the billiard table and making invisible tracks in the light white dust atop the TV. He moves his hand to the top curve of her. The cup of silk.
She’s always owned such pretty things.
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This is your swimming pool you wanted him to fill for you; your hand-terraced steps dug out with a wooden-handled trowel and minimal cursing; your bricked driveway with the special red grout he had to drive 236 miles round-trip to get; your concrete water fountain shaped like an angel or fairy or dragon or what the fuck ever; your bleach party in the camp trailer to catch Just One Mouse; your That Way; your Like This; your Please…Don’t; your surprise and your shame and your regret.
The smell of charcoal briquets stains him now. Sniff from the stopsign here and smell it from all the way down the block, taste it against the teeth.
Kneel.
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First!
You wouldn’t bee-leeve this shit she does!
Twice, even!
Oh yeah well that was before I didn’t know.
No really. It’s not like that.
Okay so it’s a little like that.
No hard feelings right?
I mean, right?
We’re good?
So….anyway…Twice!
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When that girl at the family practice hung up on him, he knew what needed to happen. And when the police pulled onto the asphalt in that bright heat, their patrol cars aflame with light and sound, all of them also knew.
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Dear Back In The Day,
I have a list of complaints. In no particular order:
1. You are a cocktease.
2. I don’t remember you the way you remember me.
3. X doesn’t cost Y anymore. It’s exponentially more expensive. Fuck you for not telling me the price.
4. You are about one inch away from being a complete fiction.
5. All things eventually get damaged, all things ultimately get broken. Stop pretending otherwise. It’s pathetic.
6. I hope you are writing one of these yourself. I can’t wait to read it and then ignore you the way you’re ignoring me.
7. There is a love I have for you but I will not allow you to have it. You simply want it too much.
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Dear Wherever You Are,
I only have praise for you. Don’t you dare try to resist me.
1. There is simply not time like the present. Cliches are cliches are cliches.And they are that way for very good reasons. Grow up and accept that.
2. I only have memory. That’s all there is. Nothing more than you can touch now.
3. The cost of everything is everything. And so is nothing. There is no difference between everything and nothing. Please try and understand.
4. Bliss isn’t ignorance. Don’t change the subject now. You are so so close to getting this right, you don’t even know.
5. You need to laugh some more. And cry some more. And Some More some more. Even more, even.
from The End of America, Book 2
by Mark Wallace
My Feelings
I feel like my feelings stand across the room from me and I try but can’t get over to them.
Stuck in a stopped line of traffic on Saturday morning, I feel like I should never leave home.
I feel like my job makes me call you a “unit.”
I feel like my feelings may not be my feelings but feelings other people want me to feel.
I feel like the TV knows I like sex and uses it against me.
I feel like saying, “Will somebody please tell me what they’re feeling?”
I feel like when we say to each other, “How are you?” we’re both relieved that we’re not really asking.
I feel like money is more real than me.
I feel like saying, “Gimme some scratch and shut up.”
I feel scared when a man interviewed on TV says, “My gun feels like my baby.”
I feel like I’m walking around dazed and lost and will be better off if I can stay there.
I feel like judging people gives me power over them but not nearly enough.
I feel worried that the way I sometimes feel about people means I’m an asshole.
I feel like wearing a shirt that reads, “Continuous Peasant.”
When somebody says to me, “Hey professor,” I feel like looking behind me to see who they’re talking to.
I feel tired of revising the document.
I feel like if you think I’m going to tell you what I feel like, you have no idea what I feel like.
I feel like sometimes I want to know what you feel like then am sorry when I find out.
I feel like you’re not going to like how I feel.
I feel like I ought to know better by now.
I feel like someone has taken the real thing and replaced it with a copy.
I feel like I’m the copy.
I feel like my feeling that powerful people want me to work 50 or 60 hours a week just so I can give them back the money I make isn’t just a feeling.
I feel like missing the meeting.
I feel like getting out while I still can.
But I don’t feel like I can.
I feel like “no fucking way.”
I feel like it might be smart to duck.
I feel like the grass on the other side probably isn’t greener.
When I’m in a car, I feel like cursing at all the other people in cars.
I feel like driving right into the lagoon.
In fact I feel like I know more than I’d like about how it feels when the car sails out over that cliff.
I feel confused by the phrases “taking a shit” and “giving a shit.”
I feel like someone must know what I’m talking about, but then I feel I’m not sure.
I feel like I’m not sure I can face it again.
In fact I feel like I’m not sure.
I feel like there are some things I’m sure about, but nobody much wants to hear those things.
I feel like I don’t want a place in the institution, I don’t want to change the institution, and I don’t want to reject the institution, but that all three will happen despite what I feel.
When I feel like saying, “Not on my dime,” I feel like it’s not my dime.
When I hear a train going by, I feel like I want to be on it.
I feel like it’s time to stop paying attention to what I feel and start noticing what’s going on around here.
I feel like instead of thinking about the present, I’m always worried about the future.
I feel like the past isn’t staying the past.
I feel like no one believes I didn’t shoot the sheriff.
I feel like a distant place on a map and I feel like going there.
I feel like saying, “Look out here comes Dr. Dark Side.”
I feel like I’d like a distraction.
I feel like I know what you’re thinking, but I don’t.
I feel like some people tell me how much they care about the world as a way of telling me they don’t like anyone.
I feel really surprised you feel that way.
I feel like I want someone to understand me but I’d feel really threatened if someone did.
I feel like you and I keep switching places.
I feel like, “Uh-oh here comes another one.”
I feel like saying, “I’m looking good and getting it done.”
I feel like I’m not sure about the difference between thinking and feeling.
I feel like I don’t want to talk about feelings.
I feel like this can’t be happening.
I feel like somebody here wants to know whether doing this makes me any money.
I feel like a skill set.
I feel like I shouldn’t look down and a moment later like I shouldn’t look up.
I feel like my life has changed to fit the application.
I feel like asking, “It’s three p.m., who wants a beer?”
I feel like I’m supposed to feel it’s time to do something desperate.
I feel like the outlaws are coming to town and all my deputies have quit.
I feel like I better know who’s standing behind me.
I feel like I stopped caring about my feelings a long time ago but my feelings keep wanting me to care.
I feel like things shouldn’t be this way.
I feel like taking a shit.
I feel better now that I have.
I feel like it’s too late to say, “Don’t tell me how I feel.”
I feel like I don’t want to but I’m going to.
I feel like grabbing the brisket.
I feel like there’s too much sugar on everything. Even the brisket.
I feel like, “One day soon,” and, “Kiss my ass goodbye.”
I feel like saying, “But that would hurt.”
I feel like I won’t bother anymore to deny it, but I feel pretty sure that I still will.
I feel like saying, “Together we can make it better,” would make every one feel better, but I don’t feel like saying it.
I feel like saying, “Well if you feel that way.”
I feel like it’s time to get off this horse.
I feel like it’s time for some solo guitar.
I feel like it’s time.
I feel like here we go again.
We Were Something Then
by Mark Wallace
for my friends in DC
Back when we poured afiniata from a 32-ounce plastic soda bottle into shot glasses, when we stood around at Biddy Mulligan’s Irish pub talking to other poets and watching the young corporates walk by, and I said the afiniata tasted like a thick fruit juice mixed with gasoline and Lorraine said she thought it tasted fine, and she had bought the plastic bottle all the way from Romania, we were something then.
And now we critique ourselves on the danger of nostalgia.
Back when we used to go to Rehobeth for the weekend and walk to the beach in the late morning after a long sleep and then in the early afternoon walk the back streets and I would think, “I’m only two blocks away from the ocean,” and a great sense of space would open inside my chest, we were something then.
And now I live near the ocean and look at it a moment in the morning before I roll up my window and drive inland to the office.
Back when we used to go to Patriot Cafe, a little dark restaurant in a squat concrete strip mall in Fairfax Virginia and have poetry readings before the karaoke sessions came on, and behind the rows of people who had come to hear poetry were people there only for food, and one evening in front of an audience that included a table full of sternly frowning young men clearly not there for poetry but who said they were engineers and decided to stay and listen anyway, almost certainly to make fun of us who liked poetry, I stole Ron Silliman’s line while reading and said, “Your haircuts are too political,” and after the reading they said grimly to Dan, “What’s this avant garde poetry? He was making fun of us,” and Dan said “Hey, you’re avant garde engineers” and they grinned and laughed, we were something then.
And now when hosting readings I survey the audience to make sure they approve of the product I deliver.
Back at that same cafe when I said to Lorraine, “Time is a form of administration and there’s no escaping it,” and she said, “It’s true it’s true,” and went into the bathroom to cry, we were something then.
And now we set our alarms carefully.
Back when we were working hard and making no money and going to readings on weekends, and sometimes in late afternoons we would make gin and tonics and sit out on a balcony overlooking the city, watching everybody walk by to the soundtrack of jazz we were playing, Sonny Criss or Sonny Rollins or Stan Getz, with St. Stephens Cathedral off in the distance, and slowly but surely over a year a new building went up across the street that eventually blocked most of the view, we were something then.
And now we still work hard except we make a little more money and there are no readings on the weekends and the balcony looks out on a little grassy courtyard and we drink gin and tonics when we invite people who aren’t quite friends over for dinner and we fire up the grill and tell stories about poets we know all over the world and everything now is not really that different from then except we always see then from the vantage of now and now from the vantage of then and it’s almost impossible not to judge then by now and now by then and not to feel that now is lacking.
Back when we had no hope that anything would change, and it seemed pleasant and dark and alone to feel lost on the streets of Washington DC on a Sunday night when the city was empty except for a few strange lost people wandering around and we were some of those strange lost people, in the dark late summer night when the air was thick and wet and hard to breathe and we were all headed home after spending the evening together, we were something then.
And now we know what we always knew and what was no different then than now, which is that what you feel always seems so much bigger than what’s happening and what’s happening is hard to feel until you look back on it and try to make sense of it, try to understand what it was and why it happened.
Back when one fall there were protests every weekend and we would go to them and then I got sick and couldn’t go and at home, reading books and coughing, I would wonder what everybody was doing at the protests, and then finally in a cold January rain I went to the presidential inauguration and got past the police checkpoint and stood in the rain with other protestors and a man with a TV camera came to me and said, “Are you here to protest?” and I said, “Yes but don’t talk to me I don’t feel good about any of this I don’t want to want to talk about it,” we were something then.
And now we watch CNN’s Situation Room and sign online petitions against animal cruelty and the war in Iraq and corporate control of health care and hatred against immigrants and we sometimes even give a little money when we’ve got it and now and then we gear up for strikes with co-workers and sometimes the strikes happen and sometimes they don’t.
Back when we had lots of friends and they would come over Tuesday night or Thursday night or Saturday night and we would sit around and talk and drink and listen to music and laugh about the hilarious surprise of actually existing and we would attack everyone who seemed not to care that anyone other than themselves existed and we would be surprised again how much we didn’t care either and then how much we did, and one night when we wanted to stay up even later than we’d thought and we went down to the corner liquor store only to find that without our knowing it, the store was no longer there, we were something then.
And now most of our friends live far away but sometimes they fly into our towns to see us or we fly into their towns to see them and we do all the same talking and drinking and attacking and being surprised at all the caring and not caring that we do and so many people do, and then our friends get back on their planes or we get back on our planes to go back to the places where we have jobs that pay us the money we don’t want but have to have, and sometimes we feel like crying for a day or two after they’ve gone or after we’ve gone but soon enough days are flowing on in the ordinary routine we barely notice.
Back when we used to go over to Doug’s house because he knew everything about jazz, because he could talk not just about Roy Eldridge and Billie Holiday and Count Basie and Mildred Bailey and Lester Young but also about Erskine Hawkins and Chu Berry and John Kirby and even some of the little known players who’d played with those little known players, and he would make CDs of rare cuts for us and bring them to parties on Rod’s balcony along with bottles of tequila or Johnnie Walker Red and drink too much, and we were worried that he was too old to be drinking so much but we were also worried that we were too young not to be enjoying our lives as much as he seemed to be, we were something then.
And now all of us have blogs and leave comments on each other’s blogs and Doug has separate blogs for art and poetry and film and most of the comments we leave on each other’s blogs remind us of those conversations we used to have.
Back when one weekend a friend was housesitting at the fancy downtown rowhouse that a university visiting writer was given for a year, and our friend invited eight of us over for dinner and drinks in the fancy rowhouse without telling the visiting writer, and Bill made steaks and potatoes and greens and we had plenty of wine and beer and laughing and toasts to the fancy rowhouse we didn’t live in and to the visiting writer who wasn’t there, and later on we cleaned up carefully but the visiting writer seemed to know there had been a party at his house because he gave his housesitting friend passive aggressive frowns and grimaces of displeasure, we were something then.
And now we understand exactly what we understood then, that “maturity” means living in the accepted collective public felony of illusions like institutions and nations and overseas wars in which family’s houses are bombed and people are displaced and die, and it means going to work and investing your money and sending your children to the right schools and never doing anything that anyone would disapprove of, especially not visiting writers and the lawyers they love, and we understand that being mature means not only doing those things but desperately needing to believe in them and so rejecting not only anything that makes fun of them but anything that even suggests that it’s possible to live with any other set of values, and even more than that we know that finally anybody can do anything they want as long as they have the money to do it, and if they don’t have money they can’t.
Back when we never believed in the illusions of art we loved art anyway not because it was an illusion but because it was something specific to do that could make us care about things that were specific instead of trying to administer and control them, we were something then.
And now we read Bourdieu’s suggestion that the distance we feel from American bourgeois norms that we can’t possibly get away from when living how we’re living is a distance that the bourgeois may have granted us by refusing to approve of us, in other words that the anger we feel towards them is really only a backlash against the anger they feel towards us.
Back when we’d see all these other writers fighting with each other over their personalities and aesthetics and cultural differences and we’d laugh at how ridiculously caught up they’d get in the differences but we’d get caught up in them too, it was impossible not to, arguing about aesthetic and political radicals, whether New York School poetry was better or Language poetry was better, and sometimes in bars or at parties people would start shouting or make cruel funny jokes about people who weren’t there, and poets from older generations would say younger poets were doing nothing new and younger poets would say older poets were caught up in hierarchies already long gone, we were something then.
And now we talk to people for whom none of these issues and writers exist and we say things like, “Why don’t you read these writers you might find them interesting,” although the lives of these writers and the lives of these people are so far apart that there’s almost no likelihood that more than a few of them will ever have anything in common.
Back when we would take a weekend trip to Annapolis or Philadelphia or New York and see the people we wanted to see who lived there and who we used to see more when they lived near us, and we would say to them, “It’s good to see you it’s been so long since we talked,” and they would say, “We’re so busy we never get to talk to anybody as much as we’d like,” we were something then.
And now we visit them and say the same things except it’s been even longer since we talked.
Back when we didn’t know what we believed in but we knew what we didn’t believe in, we were something then.
And now we know what we believe in or don’t know what we believe in or don’t know if it matters what we believe in.
Back when we took nothing seriously but knew that everything was serious, we were something then.
And now we look at what we were then and what we are now and we don’t know what we are now and we know we didn’t know then and the thing is, the absolutely true thing is, that we’re always living now and either looking back on then or thinking about how now will someday become then or that what hasn’t happened yet will soon become that which has already happened, and we know that time is not a continuous present anymore than it moves clearly from past to future, and we know now exactly what we knew then, which is that we’re always doing something, even if we’re just sitting and thinking about what we knew then and how we knew it, and even if one of us has just had a dream in which someone said, “J doesn’t like your poems because three or four times in every poem, you’re just sitting there thinking,” we know that living is the fact of always doing something and we know too that being conscious of what we’re doing, how it feels that we’re doing it and knowing we are doing it, is the best way to be in the life you have to live whether you’re thinking you can stand to live it or not.
Back when we were uncertain where we would live next year or in two years or in five or ten, and what we would be doing in those years and who we would be loving or would have stopped loving or had decided we had never loved, we were something then.
And now some of us anyway know where we will be for awhile and who will be with us or who not, and we find potential not in what we may already know about the future but in what we may any moment be doing in the present.
Back then we wanted to live now, now, now, and here now is, again, and we want to live now, now, now, and we are something.
And sooner or later we will again remember then and remember that we were something then, and sooner or later we will again focus on now and how now always feels so desperately close to nothing that we have to do something about it, and maybe we will even remember that when we look at then we always forget the nothing that was part of then, because oddly enough the nothing is always in the now and never in the then.
Oh we were something, then. The world seemed like it had been given to us then.
And now one of us hides out in the California hills, drinking bad whiskey and grading endless papers, and another of us, formerly this and formerly that, administers several programs and hopes he won’t get found out for believing in none of them, and another of us walks the hallways of a building late at night, making sure all the doors are locked and telling jokes to his ragged reflection in a mirror, and another of us lives in the 100+ plus degrees of the South talking about the aesthetics of the avant garde to bored rich college students, and some of the rest of us live where they always did in a place that’s inevitably no longer the same, and all of us like the rest of us have gone on to new fights, new blind-siding dangers in the collective day, new ways of loving or trying to love someone other than ourselves, whether we have moved anywhere or not and where we are feeling the nothing and making of it the something that we have no choice but to make, and we could say that it was good or we could say that it was bad and we could be saying it to each other, which is most of what we were always doing, then and now, but either way it still goes on, for a little while anyway, and we do something and turn around and look at and say, “What was that?” and then tell ourselves it was something, because it was, and we were something when we did it, because we were, although what we tell ourselves it was and what it was and the differences between those things is the one thing we can never tell that keeps us telling it.
Now That I Have No Desire For You Anymore
by Elizabeth Burns
Now that I have no desire for you anymore, I can tell you everything. When I first found out what you did, I drove to my sister Clara's in Boulder and bought a bottle of tequila and some limes and a pack of cigarettes. Clara owed me for the time I let her stay in my apartment after Gerry kicked her out because she was cheating and got caught.
My boss gave me leave, said he'd hire an assistant who was desperate anyway, was all but finished training. So my sister Clara and I started driving through New Mexico, and I started breathing finally the minute I crossed the border. There was a state line between you and me.
In New Mexico, Clara and I drove through a tiny town by mistake. We took a turn off from the highway, and thought we would find gasoline and a bathroom, but we didn't. And even though this doesn't seem like it could be true, I saw a man who looked like the skinny version of the Buddha. The man was in a tiny cemetery by the side of the road and he was folded up, praying, in the way only Buddhists do. I know he stared at me in prayer, but I have no way to verify this. My sister says she didn't see him, but she was driving. I decided he was praying for me to lose my desire for you, which obviously I have now done.
We stopped in Santa Fe next, and Clara had money to buy clothes and postcards. I on the other hand was poorer than I had ever been, having spent whatever was left of my salary on gas, booze, weed, and whatever else it took to burn you out of my life. I suppose that included every piece of my clothing you ever undressed me of, or touched or breathed on or went near. So that's everything. I needed new underwear and sure as hell wasn't going to buy that at Goodwill, so I had to buy some stuff at a Penney's, even though I hate them because the salespeople are ornery and look like wax and smell like stiff bandanas.
In Santa Fe we stayed with friends who served us salads made from their garden. First they had to remove the tiny snails from the leaves. Who knew there were snails in Santa Fe? The friends asked about you but Clara gave them a look and besides I didn't remember anything about you by then. I didn't sleep because the birds sang like drunks all night behind the shuttered windows.
Now that I have no desire for you I can tell you that it was a bitch driving through west Texas. No storm came up; there was no weather at all. The land and the sky stayed the same, sealed up against each other, no interruption from thunder or landscape. Just the occasional armadillo, snake, lone boot, tumbleweed, but none of these were ever a surprise.
I didn't desire you on this trip and I did not tell my sister about it. I did not tell her about the indentation that runs from your thumb down to your wrist, and the strong slight bones that make the hollow there. I didn't tell her about that because it is too intimate and I don't remember it, anyway. That's everything that didn't happen there.
I did not tell her about the way you shot your thumb into my mouth so that I would learn how to suck you the way you would like to be sucked on by me. I did not tell her this for the same reasons mentioned above.
Because I did not desire you on this trip, I had no reason to think of you making your way north up the California coast 'til you reached Canada on your way to visit some punkpiss I heard on the voicemail who could never be better at me at love or crying or telling stories or listening or holding or forgetting, and besides I don't care because I don't desire you.
Because I did not desire you on this trip, I had no need to stand in the water at Galveston and wait for the waves to knock me over and almost break my neck. I went to a bookstore to read the backs of books and see if I could figure out the words. I came close to reading a book about the hurricane that killed people in Galveston in the early twentieth century, but the last thing I was going to spend my money on was books. I had already sold most of them in Denver to buy peanut butter and jelly and cheap bread for the road trip. That was all that happened in Galveston.
Because I knew it was safe now that I no longer desired you, I borrowed the money from Clara and flew back to Denver. My boss said I could have my job back if I worked closely with some trainees, and I could think of nothing worse than fixing the copier over and over again with some twenty-year-olds who would wear too much cologne and new cheap suits, but I knew I was over you and that I needed the money to pay back Clara. And I didn't want to start at the bottom again.
So that was the reason I flew back to Denver. Besides, I can always drive up to Cheyenne for the day. It’s cooler up there, another state, and I like the prairie dogs by the side of the road. I can tell they like me back, the way they spin in the dirt by the highway.
So that's what's happening back in Denver.
Not that I would ever let you know.
Now that it's safe again, and I have no desire for you.