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To keep me from staying out late at night, my mother warned of the Hell Pig. Black and full of hot drool, eyes the color of a lung—it'd follow me home if I stayed past my curfew. How to tell my friends to press Pause in the middle of a video, say their good-byes while I shuffled up the stairs and into my father's waiting blue car? How to explain this to my dates, whisper why we could not finish this dance? It's not like the pig had any special powers or could take a tiny bite from my leg—only assurances that it was simply scandal to be followed home. When my date and I pull into my driveway and dim the lights, we take care to make all the small noises that get made in times like these even smaller: squeaks in the seats, a slow spin of the radio dial, the silver click of my belt. Too late. A single black hair flickers awake the ear of the dark animal waiting for me at the end of the walk. My fumbling of keys and various straps a wild dance to the door—the pig grunting in tune to each hurried step, each of his wet breaths puffing into tiny clouds, a small storm brewing.

CHORUS The world's great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn: Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam Like wrecks of a dissolving dream. A brighter Hellas rears its mountains From waves serener far; A new Peneus rolls his fountains Against the morning star. Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep. A loftier Argo cleaves the main, Fraught with a later prize; Another Orpheus sings again, And loves, and weeps, and dies. A new Ulysses leaves once more Calypso for his native shore. Oh, write no more the tale of Troy, If earth Death's scroll must be! Nor mix with Laian rage the joy Which dawns upon the free: Although a subtler Sphinx renew Riddles of death Thebes never knew. Another Athens shall arise, And to remoter time Bequeath, like sunset to the skies, The splendour of its prime; And leave, if nought so bright may live, All earth can take or Heaven can give. Saturn and Love their long repose Shall burst, more bright and good Than all who fell, than One who rose, Than many unsubdu'd: Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers, But votive tears and symbol flowers. Oh cease! must hate and death return? Cease! must men kill and die? Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn Of bitter prophecy. The world is weary of the past, Oh might it die or rest at last!

Some nights the rat with pointed teeth makes his long way back to the bowl of peaches. He stands on the dining room table sinking his tooth drinking the pulp of each fruity turned-up face knowing you will read this message and scream. It is his only text, to take and take in darkness, to be gone before you awaken and your giant feet start creaking the floor. Where is the mother of the rat? The father, the shredded nest, which breath were we taking when the rat was born, when he lifted his shivering snout to rafter and rivet and stone? I gave him the names of the devil, seared and screeching names, I would not enter those rooms without a stick to guide me, I leaned on the light, shuddering, and the moist earth under the house, the trailing tails of clouds, said he was in the closet, the drawer of candles, his nose was a wick. How would we live together with our sad shoes and hideouts, our lock on the door and his delicate fingered paws that could clutch and grip, his blank slate of fur and the pillow where we press our faces? The bed that was a boat is sinking. And the shores of morning loom up lined with little shadows, things we never wanted to be, or meet, and all the rats are waving hello.

my old friend I wonder how far north you travel? The road goes west starting two doors up from the Dog’s Bollocks ending at sunset. So many sunsets Facebook and Instagram couldn’t contain them. So many yellow lines, white stripes there’s hardly a Valiant left to defy them. Now the years overtake us. Visits as a boy to Uncle Bruce and Aunty Lindy in their K’Rd council flat led me to the greatness of  the great north whipping its dusty tail up to the skyline of  Reinga. Yet why do I see your darkness as silence my friend? You’re a sleek black eel pumping blood all the way to Karekare, to Muriwai, to Bethells, to Piha, and our vehicles surf the surges back to K’Rd, back and forth, LOL, rocking up our shock absorbers and surfboards. Keep bringing the waves Great North Road. Keep saving the whales! Keep the toheroas shining tucked away from spades in sandy bolt-holes. Smile in your cars and honk honk honk on the Great North Road.

For as long as I've known her, my mother's two things are going to Mass at Our Lady of Peace and playing bingo in North Hollywood. Guilty from leaving me at home all night, she'd bring a pink paper bag with Sanrio characters printed all over it. Every week would be different inside. The size of the bag would depend on if she got lucky that night or if she broke even, which she believed was the same as winning. Inside, there were stickers, pencils, a pencil case, paper, lollipops, a diary. It was the period when Pochacco just came out and I was skeptical of transitioning out of my love for Hello Kitty and onto smaller more obscure colorful characters. My mother knew this because she could read my mind, so she only bought Hello Kitty things. I would stay up until midnight and wait for when she'd pull up in her white Cadillac onto the concrete driveway. Smelling like Marlboro Reds which I associated with evil, she'd wake me up from being somewhere between half asleep & dreaming of a crush. But Hello Kitty lived in heaven, and my mother and I were not in heaven. We were in the San Fernando Valley, the porn capital. And on the way to Mass every Sunday, we would drive by houses with swimming pools where money shots were being made.

1 My soul radially whorls out to the edges of my body, according to the same laws by which stars shine, communicating with my body by emanation. When you see her, you feel the impact of what visual can mean. Invisibility comes through of deep pink or a color I see clairvoyantly. This felt sense at seeing the rose extends, because light in the DNA of my cells receives light frequencies of the flower as a hologram. The entire rose, petals in moving air, emotion of perfume records as a sphere, so when I recall the emotion, I touch dimensionality. From a small bud emerges a tight wound bundle of babyskin coral petals, held in a half globe, as if by cupped hands. Then petals are innumerable, loose, double, sumptuous, unified. I look through parted fingers to soften my gaze, so slow light shining off the object is filtered; then with feeling I look at swift color there. It's swiftness that seems still as noon light, because my seeing travels at the same speed. I make a reciprocal balance between light falling on the back of my eye to optic nerve to pineal gland, radiance stepping down to matter, and my future self opening out from this sight. A moment extends to time passing as sense impression of a rose, including new joys where imagined roses, roses I haven't yet seen or seen in books record as my experience. Then experience is revelation, because plants and people have in their cells particles of light that can become coherent, that radiate out physically and also with the creativity of metaphor, as in a beam of light holographically, i.e., by intuition, in which I inhale the perfume of the Bourbon rose, then try to separate what is scent, sense, and what you call memory, what is emotion, where in a dialogue like touching is it so vibratory and so absorbent of my attention and longing, with impressions like fingerprints all over. I'm saying physical perception is the data of my embodiment, whereas for the rose, scarlet itself is matter. 2 The rose communicates instantly with the woman by sight, collapsing its boundaries, and the woman widens her boundaries. Her "rate of perception" slows down, because of its complexity. There's a feeling of touching and being touched, the shadings of color she can sense from touch. There's an affinity between awareness and blossom. The rose symbolizes the light of this self-affinity. I come to visit drooping white cabbage roses at dusk. That corner of the garden glows with a quality of light I might see when light shines through mist or in early morning reflects off water. I stand quietly and allow this quality to permeate air around me. Here, with a white rose, color is clairsentient, this color in the process of being expressed, like seeing Venus in the day. Walking, I move in and out of negative space around which each rose is engaged and become uncertain of my physical extent as an object. Look at the energy between people and plants; your heart moves into depth perception; for depth, read speed of light. I set my intention through this sense of moving into coherence with the bio-photons of a plant and generate feeling in response. A space opens and awareness gathers it in, as at night my dream is colorless and weaves into the nuance. I can intentionally engage with the coherence of light beams, instant as though lightless, or the colored light of a dimension not yet arrived, as our hearts are not outside affinity with respect to wavelength, shaping meaning, using the capacity for feeling to sense its potency in a rose and to cultivate inter-being with summer perfume.

the Chinaman said don’t take the hardware and gave me a steak I couldn’t cut (except the fat) and there was an ant circling the coffee cup; I left a dime tip and broke out a stick of cancer, and outside I gave an old bum who looked about the way I felt, I gave him a quarter, and then I went up to see the old man strong as steel girders, fit for bombers and blondes, up the green rotten steps that housed rats and past the secretaries showing leg and doing nothing and the old man sat there looking at me through two pairs of glasses and a vacation in Paris, and he said, Kid, I hear you been takin’ Marylou out, and I said, just to dinner, boss, and he said, just to dinner, eh? you couldn’t hold that broad’s pants on with all the rivets on 5th street, and please remember you are a shipping clerk, I am the boss here and I pay these broads and I pay you. yes, sir, I said, and I felt he was going to skip it but he slid my last check across the desk and I took it and walked out past all the lovely legs, the skirts pulled up to the ass, Marylou’s ass, Ann’s ass, Vicki’s ass, all of them, and I went down to the bar and George said whatya gonna do now, and I said go to Russia or Hollywood Park, and I looked up in time to see Marylou come in, the long thin nose, the delicate face, the lips, the legs, the breasts, the music, the talk the love the laughing and she said I quit when I found out and the bastard got down on his knees and cried and kissed the hem of my skirt and offered me money and I walked out and he blubbered like a baby. George, I said, another drink, and I put a quarter in the juke and the sun came out and I looked outside in time to see the old bum with my quarter and a little more luck that had turned into a happy wine-bottle, and a bird even flew by cheep cheep, right there on Eastside downtown, no kidding, and the Chinaman came in for a quickie claiming somebody had stolen a spoon and a coffee cup and I leaned over and bit Marylou on the ear and the whole joint rocked with music and freedom and I decided that Russia was too far away and Hollywood Park just close enough.

I need help with long term hope I need help with the dawn of war and achieving my new year's resolutions This praise song and the problem of pornography structures this praise song as speaking placement I need help moving my chickens I need help with girl problem my dog, like, keeps marking the wrong areas? and my breasts this most pressing issue like choosing between best friends a distance problem involving constant acceleration and tethering glitches The party's all "descendant selectors, please!" and me I'm in my handspring visor and my bird plucking problem I need help with a bat script for parsing I need help with pricing with naming this praise song I said I seriously need help with the whole set up ASAP! so it's 40.08 /100.09 (grams of molecular mass of calcium carbonate) = moles of calcium then (moles of Calcium x .1973ml (convert grams to ml)) / 0.05 I got 1.580 ml is that right?

Santa needs new reindeer. The first bunch has grown old. Dasher has arthritis; Comet hates the cold. Prancer's sick of staring at Dancer's big behind. Cupid married Blitzen and Donder lost his mind. Dancer's mad at Vixen for stepping on his toes. Vixen's being thrown out— she laughed at Rudolph's nose. If you are a reindeer we hope you will apply. There is just one tricky part: You must know how to fly.

This is all I am to her now: a pair of legs in running shoes, two arms strung with braided wire. She heaves a carton sagging with CDs at me and I accept it gladly, lifting with my legs, not bending over, raising each foot high enough to clear the step. Fortunate to be of any use to her at all, I wrestle, stooped and single-handed, with her mattress in the stairwell, saying nothing as it pins me, sweating, to the wall. Vacuum cleaner, spiny cactus, five-pound sacks of rice and lentils slumped against my heart: up one flight of stairs and then another, down again with nothing in my arms.