I don't know how long I'll be able to do this

I was a teenage insomniac. There were no poems then, just glass bottles of Pepsi, 16 oz., ten cent deposit. I suppose pictures too. Sketches in American Cedar pencil. Late night talk (Crispin Glover, Karate kicks), my dead grandpa (struck me up |bolt| in bed fifteen before the night terrors began a long night of belated anguish).

Twenty-three years old manic episode. Enter religion, Neil Young, a man named Tree. Making out with the neighbor (but not really). Skin too white: look close it flakes lips like bright pink leeches. Things are changing. Clouds in skies. Your bird can sing. Great jugs of Carlo Rossi, menthol fags. Alcohol still a fast pal. I'm spatchcocked to my imaginary love life. Sex, afterall, was not an issue.

Pensive means thoughtful and inside my Chuck Taylors I'm thinking about money and how to make it how to meet women and how to "fulfill my potential." Summer of 18 mile runs. The river: bridges, herons, LSD. I make a fine salad with sweet corn and bulgur. There is a closeness behind that glass. Don't rupture. Split open. Couch on concrete.

Twenty-six years ago, Mt. St. Helens exploded. Fine ash fell on everything, my seven year old shoulders, flat stones. Swallows set up house in the eaves. Everyone leaves my repeated theme. Everyone leaves and leaves out the important parts. What you get here is skeleton: the parts that might make you ashamed, that might soften what's beyond the bone is withheld for further investigation. Make sure your tags are right.

Filth and ten dollars a week. If it rains this weekend, more soup for me. What the eighties mean to me can be broken down thus: caffeine, skater shoes, Run DMC, the red school, first kiss (braces), ospreys, Marcella Hazan, and lonely pinned to the railroad tracks to the 6th or 8th milepost, past the Forest Service, rumors of cougars though I only saw them stuffed and taxidermized. It's like love. How I heard of it once.