ill wills

when you're walking in a heat wave you see them and duck. you try to shake them but they stick around like a bad attitude.

they're tailing you.

how's this for verisimilitude?

writing an essay about being a writer. i'm on the search for truth and beauty in prose and style. i'm looking like a pilgrim for my vocation. we're trying to get critical, real in-depth like. heart of the matter time in writersville. i'm trying to get heavy, philosophically powerful about writing and what it is to write and writing about life. the heights, man, the heights of literary art. they're up there, way, way up were common man can only just gaze and weep and never achieve truth. writing an essay about being a writer.

but really, i'm writing a piece of academic, sycophantic, psychosomatic bullshit for a grade that says nothing. writing an essay about being a writer, while drinking a fucking beer.

ghosts

she haunted me last night when i saw her. then it wasn't her at all.

then where was i?

scald, s'called, scale'd

the mouth's interior tastes like gasoline

it hints itself, never intrusive

sliding inward like black liquid goldmines

to the depths of the throat cavities

it soaks in the large intestine

a taste

an odor

sensation

a vice up to your sinuses

your eyes are brimming in butane, ready to burn

they're soaking.