I pick up the skirt, I pick up the sparkling beads in black, this thing that moved once around flesh,

They had me in the counselor’s office in one of the back rooms of the second floor. “Let me see how you look, Chinaski.” He looked at me. “All right, Mr. Chinaski, we’d like to know whe...

the old folks play a game in the park overlooking the sea shoving markers across cement with wooden sticks. four play, two on each side

which reminds me I shacked with Jane for 7 years she was a drunk I loved her my parents hated her

you came out, she said, and then you kicked this guy’s car and then you threw yourself into a… you crushed the whole bush,

the motion of the human heart: strangled over Missouri; sheathed in hot wax in Boston; burned like a potato in Norfolk; lost in the Allegheny Mountains;

the vultures at the zoo (all three of them) sit very quietly in their caged tree and below

kool enough to die but not kill I take my doctor’s green pill drink tea as the sharks swim through vases o…

look there. the one you considered killing you… for. you saw her the other day getting out of her car

there are beasts in the salt shake… and airdromes in the coffeepot. my mother’s hand is in the bag dra… and from the backs of spoons come the cries of tiny tortured animals…

He hinted at times that I was a bastard and I told him to listen to Brahms, and I told him to learn to paint and drink and not be dominated by women and dollars but he screamed at me, F...

I went into the bends. I got drunker and stayed drunker than a shit skunk in Purgatory. I even had the butcher knife against my throat one night in the kitchen and then I thought, easy,...