I got so deep I drowned.

Slit my wrist, bled black ink.

You gotta love the train at 4am or 5 or 6 (or whenever you exactly remove yourself from that night’s therapy session – the corner bar, that evening’s prostitute, your ex). L. Love. Lust. Libido. Longing. Tonight, it was the prostitute who saved me. That and the 40 of malt liquor in the back cupboard, her crack pipe, a wispiness, a waiflike quality of a fairy. The star-dusted dance. Lua. That was her name. She had a limp – a sexy Hustler-esque limp. …maybe it was the drugs… I could have sworn ...

I crept into your bed last night - slipped out of my slippers, my cable knit sweater, my worn jeans. I curled into the far left corner of the mattress, felt your absent breath. I went through your drawers - found a scribble about your latest infatuation, a stick-figure drawing, an empty bottle of red wine we shared what seems like years ago. I smoked about three packs of cigarettes on the drive home, belting out old 90s love songs, not quite sure who I was singing to.

At 1:35 am on New Year’s Day, you decided you had had enough, But, honestly, you left the same night she had, 11 years ago. At 1:35 am on New Year’s Day, I said that I was ashamed of you, Called you backwoods, whitetrash, a poor schmuck stuck in a dream world where you could still button your own pants, and use A urinal without the aid of the only male nurse at the rest home in Cape Fear, North Carolina. He was black. You would have called him a “nigger,” 12 years ago Before you needed his ma...

I got into my car, the beat up thing, and wondered what exactly I might say to you: Nothing felt right. Then I passed a dying tree – some sort of African disease. I don’t know the term, or maybe I did, long before, in beginning biology, my first year of college. Of course, the mysteries of the natural world didn’t concern me then. I was more interested in that week’s frat party, or if the skinny, tattooed boy in the back row of my American Lit class knew my name, noticed the way I knew exactl...