P-Town

Sam tells me that nobody 
ever has fun playing mini golf 
as I stare at the Murakami shelf 
in Tim's Used Books. I hand him 
a copy of Kafka on the Shore 
as the shrooms hit me. I am 19
again in Berlin, reading it for
the first time over cheap sushi,
waiting for something to make
sense. I wish I could write while 
asleep. I don’t know how to 
explain what the book is about.
It just is. Lost cat. Oedipal curse.
Talking cats. Running away.

I run out of the store.
Claustrophobic by the stacks. Your
dad follows us as we walk onto 
the bridge to untroubled water, 
laughing at the present tense. 
He asks what we’re laughing 
about. We get that a lot. Like 
mischievous twins. I think of the boy
Crow and the mysterious flash
of light atop a rice bowl. What if 
everything I could comprehend one
day disappeared. 

Chance encounters 
are what keep us going, Murakami
writes. Like the surfing team we 
meet on the docks who almost get
us kicked out or Will in the fog I
call home. I used to crowdsurf 
at Sunday school and eat violas 
with my bare hands. I lost 
at mini golf and sit next to you 
watching the waves multiply, the way 
they do with or without drugs.

Lepidopterologist

I read 

in the headlines 

that a fourteen

year old boy 

died last night 

from injecting 

a butterfly 

into his bloodstream.

I am that crushed 

monarch,

a specimen for capture. 

One of Nabokov’s studies, 

preserved in a glass jar. 

Dissected 

for pleasure 

or a schoolboy dare. 

I dare you 

to catch me 

when the breeze turns 

to hail

turns to car crash. 

Cocooned 

in anti-freeze 

in a December 

that never turns to

Spring.