The things I observe and believe and say only mechanically deepen your fear, and you are not alone in that.

All they do is make a desperate escape into indulgent frozen desserts and pretend holidays seem more appealing, even more necessary, and so that is the path you choose–you flee my chronic intonations; they’re not helping, and at last even I can plainly observe how that works.

I don’t know what I’m doing.

I do at last know by this point that I’m not doing it for you.

As for why I am doing it anyway, I neither know nor think that I know.

I stand beneath the moon by the crossing gate, waiting solo, waiting on the double E.

I murmur about my own exquisitely delicate alienation but you don’t hear it

because I’ve alienated you.

Every day there is a new blank page.

(Being worthy of dignity and respect and love is not the same as deserving them.)

Every day is that very same new blank page reflected in the liquid eye of the metaphor horse.