4.11.17

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Allow me to divvy up my soul:

17% belongs to drugs and alcohol. 3% belongs to each of my parents and my sister and niece.

76% belongs to the Internet.

24% belongs to failure.

3% belongs to success.

60% belongs to food and thinking of food.

70% belongs to thoughts about loneliness and purposeless existence.

12% belongs to positivity.

99% belongs to coffee.

25% belongs to writing.

100% belongs to abandoned or incomplete art projects.

81% belongs to potential.

99% belongs to lost opportunity.

10% belongs to Jurassic Park.

1% belongs to potential alien life forms.

7% belongs to each DFW, Faulkner, Woolf, Johnson, Mann, Dostoyevsky, Munro, and Justin Vernon.

1% belongs to Shakespeare.

33% belongs to guilt.

34% belongs to hatred of organized religion.

10% belongs to suppressed anger and grudges.

50% belongs to California

The rest of it belongs to apathy and laziness.

Some of it, also, must belong to you.

Or perhaps all of it does.

I suppose you own the whole thing outright, and so you should.

This poem is less masturbatory than you think.

In fact, it’s a thank you note.

Consider this retribution for dealing so beautifully with every hurtful thing I’ve said to you. Consider this recompense for knowing you can do better yet staying in the trenches with me.

My soul is (apparently) composed of 873 sections, which I’ve represented here in percentages.

Know that it is all yours, and do with it as you please.

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Written at 4:31 in the afternoon, in my office, in Agoura Hills CA, after watching two episodes of Big Little Lies.