You are others more sentimental. You are a word-processor. You are a word appliance.

You greet each new player as a fool. Deem each new experience a failure.

The receptionist stared at the candy cane until she got vertigo, told you she liked your skirt.

For lunch you ate the brand of tuna born in a can.

The telling pause between the sigh and the lie. The hand up your skirt. On the subway

You should start reading true crime books again.

Two bosses is a lucky thing.

Sheila threw fits. So you’d know she was serious. She pointed at the calendar. She said the days are burning. She circled the due date again. Stabbed her marker inside the circle. Bullseye.

Her t-shirt would read: I’m not a negotiator. I’m a bitch.

She has the kind of upper lip that Matt Groenig would draw.

He talked with his hands, Stephen. He did emphatic good. He nodded when he spoke. He nodded when he listened. He wanted to be hypnotized. He said, Hypnotized is an ideal state.

He’s balding, but he wears it well. A tall man with a short fuse.

He felt the need to remind you: Fussy gay guys always get their way.

You spent the whole day online and now your face feels as flat as your laptop’s screen. You try to smile, to bring an expression to your face, unsure if there’s any definition left to your features.

They both remind you that whatever it is, it must be poetry.

Daring you to be daring.

They got along like a couple of Seventeenth Century British hand-puppets, always fighting, clobbering each other over the head with hollow bats sewn to their palms.

Agonized and clear—Dickinson.

Stephen sends you an email: RE Sheila—Power-hungry maniacs do it for the glee.

Not to worry. You have a system of entropy when it comes to words.

You wrote a dozen poems one semester that your roommate described as dictionary-ish.

You’re a little bit winning, you know. Some small part of you is happy. The masochistic part.