Based on a true story. 

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2.17.17

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Let’s keep this between us.

I will put into these words

my thoughts

and you will feel them. You will

feel the words and the thoughts

attached to them. Take this word

for example: Yellow. What does

that word mean to you? To me,

it means the woman’s heart

I snapped in half while dining

at a seafood restaurant and eating

lobster with liquified butter the color

of phlegm. I learned that day what it means

to surrender to a person. Relationships

are two shattered mirrors facing one another. Glimpses

caught in fragmented glass, bodies chopped up

into their vital essences. Here

eye

mouth

hair

skin

smile

(indistinguishable)

The part you can’t decipher will haunt you. What was that part

you did not understand? Why, when you tell her you’ve had enough

of her, do her eyes flash, for an instant, the color of liquified butter,

which is dribbling down your chin? Why, in that instant,

do you understand what you’ve neglected all along: that she loves you.

You open your mouth to speak. Nothing happens. She throws a napkin

in your face and leaves with tears, while you cough up a piece of lobster

lodged in your windpipe, covered in a yellowish goop.

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Written at 1:00 at night, in my office, in Agoura Hills CA, while fighting my bladder. I need to pee.