The amazing poetess wrote a line that gave me a dream where my ex was a torso hopping around in a bookstore with no good books, and where I was picking him up and hugging him and sobbing and feeling all the sadness in my life and his life at once.

The next morning I vowed to pull the same stunt the amazing poetess had pulled: inspire a suicide in a perfect stranger.

I wrote a story about Apple Jacks and turnstiles and barracudas in pink sunglasses smashed all over the highway. I was not sure how to write something that would upheave anyone.

Meanwhile, the amazing poetess was definitely believing in and/or trusting completely in her own perfect and original version of God. When she reaches, her God reaches back, like on the Sistine Chapel's ceiling.

When you and I were in Rome, I don't remember what happened, just that we didn't go or try to go to the Sistine Chapel. My memory, among other things, is toast. Probably we were trashed. And maybe we walked around town and looked at buildings and shoes we'd never afford and I held you up while we stumbled home.

All of which was the same thing we did every day in our town. I did not see a problem with this at the time. Or, rather: I did not have the guts to write it down.

While the amazing poetess reaches, I spin a yawn. I make a furry pinwheel of language that goes whoop-de-do in a lax breeze. It is what I like. It is a failure.