An Admission, and: Dear Pillow, It’s Been a Bad Day, and: Somewhere in Maine an Old Dream Staggers On

An Admission

I wandered one time, free of all objections, knowing I was wrong about the way to be happy, or good. I was truly wandering, this once, the essence of fearlessness. I moved with grace and did nothing for anyone. To prolong my absence I ate fish and slept in the canyons where I caught them. It’s hardly worth writing about, really, except for the friend I carved out of bark then burned in order to start my fire. As I sat there, complete in a canopy of hemlock, I concluded wandering was overrated. Getting back was no problem, and since then I’ve lived the good life, in love with fear, inhabited by others, tethered as if by wires and hair to a name here, a flash of landscape there, sadness and happiness the same sure thing, a leaf blown back or a wedding ring. It’s very nice, being back, the mail I get all letters from home. All I do now is wait for my windy day, convinced I’ve wasted much more than enough. If I look bored, I’m not—I’m just inside, completely inside, nothing if not noiseless for the thing that gratifies me next.

Dear Pillow, It’s Been a Bad Day

When I feel hateful, as I so frequently do, sucked backward, bloated with self-pity, wrong-hearted, stale, a source of poison and a force for nothing worth anything, a slut for wasted time and wasted money; when I get this way, when I want the bastard gone, when I shrivel at my window a victim of my dreams come true, yawning, staring at the screen, waking into a flashback in which I, the protagonist, lie with my tongue cut out in an enormous bowl of broken egg shells, wrapped up in several sets of old jumper cables, gagging on crab apples, my eyes a pair of balled up letters; when I am like this, when I am home, when I am ugliest, I can see how I may not be easy to be with. I spent decades believing I was the happy one, the stoned one, the one who never stole anything, who never died. I was patient, people ignored me and I didn’t care, the river places I fished clean were the way I found my bed each night, dirty and worn out yes but in all the wrong ways. I never believed in knowing much about the birds, or in understanding poetry, and I did ok, though I admit there were secrets I guarded like a bad mood, even when I couldn’t sleep, even in friendship. Speaking of which, my hatefulness deprives me of the shine of others, even as I surround myself with snapshots. There is no place to put my watch and keys. You whose memory I scour for answers to my chronic love of tv, you whose affection for me I cannot recognize, you whose distance makes me paranoid about the phone, I understand now that you are all, together and also by yourselves, the faint, sun-scorched, barbed wired path I need because at the end of the day it bottoms out in that canyon, where I once ate angels for dinner, the ones I caught and slit the bellies of and tasted one sweet fingerful at a time. The moonsmilk wet their tiny delicate bones. When I get the truck stuck and lose my shit and scream deeper into the woods than even the bobcat kittens go, I tell the kids I’m so sorry, don’t be afraid, forget, please don’t grow up to be like me; and perhaps they won’t. There’s light and time and mudcake to be made. I always thought it would be easier than this, but I’d forgotten the warning that stranger once gave me and my friends, about life not being too short, but too long, life being something perfect and song-weary and too long; always having to...