Straw legs.  I'm afraid I'll spill apart with every step.  Writers and readers, treat me kindly.  They seem to be everywhere these days.  Everything seems so unfair, so brutal.  That's what I say.  The Straw Man Argument.

Wet concrete looks so dead.  More alien than all alien things.  Moon dust is very little, after all.  We could be breathing it now.  A car wreck in the rain looks like a watercolor accident.

I've dreamt my way across San Francisco.  That makes it more mine than not.

Angels with guns.  The Four Tops sing, "Heaven Must Have Sent You" while they poke their bullet fingers through the heads of old men.  It's a horrible thing to see a man's explode like a cabbage under a mallet.  But is it true?  Are they equivalent?

This is not just nonsense.  It's not just dark misery.  This is darksense.  No one can read a rule book in the dark.  These, then, are the light's-out rules.

Aspire to be a top.  It spins but will not fall if it spins fast enough.  Roll it down swords, spin it across rope.  The wet and awful world is a top.  The sad and damaged beauty is a top.  She turns slowly to soft bar music, and she totters from table to table.

The awfulness of the world is upon me.  I've redrafted my brain to be a dark walnut, a burnt cork.  Thank God for love!  Too bad, however, that love is the dark deconstructionist, putting crowbars through plaster bones and putty hearts.

Please, God, don't mistake my sour candy pages for disenchantment.  I'm just miserable and afraid and the world's a beautiful bleak whorehouse.  I don't want to hurt the ones I love.  I don't want to extinguish necessary lights, important shadows.  My cold-fingered God, I merely pray that you are warmhearted.