6.23.17

Describe your paradise, she says.

I say, A circular table near a running stream,

the sun bright on a heatless day, and I’m

sitting at the table with someone, shit,

anyone of the world’s heroes,

Woolf or Conrad or Fyodor or

Brodkey or Denis or Ernest or Tobias or

Wallace or Hempel or Munro or Bukowski or

Brautigan or Mann or Faulkner, preferably

above all else, Faulkner, whose words work

like medicine on my broken soul, and we are

seated at the circular table near the stream

as birds sing and the water glistens, and

between us a fresh pot of black coffee, and

we do nothing but speak.

.

.

Wow, she says. My paradise is being anywhere with you.

.

shit. i fucked it up again.

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Written at 12:23 at night, in my office, in Agoura Hills CA.