Surrey with the Fringe on Top -Happy Birthday. I bet you thought I was going to forget. Right. I remember it every single year. I still don�t really know how old you are now, maybe 3 years younger than I am? Our first birthday spent together, your parents took you and your twin sister to eat, and I remember watching you and her eat together. Sixteenth birthday. You and I went off somewhere afterwards and fucked five times in my Plymouth with punk rock music on the tape deck. �Happy Birthday hon, I love you� I probably whispered in your ear. You once wrote me a letter years later saying you would �never forget your first� Do you remember my birthday? Are you going to write me a letter like this? Happy Birthday. Here�s what I want you to have on your birthday: I want you to have that inner peace like I have right now. I want you to achieve that inner peace I have the same way I do, by being alone. I want you to have a lonely piece of cake in your kitchen. The linoleum floor, the radio, and you celebrating your birthday. Perhaps a couple phone calls from family members to cheer you up early in the evening. Around nine o�clock I want you to wonder where everyone is with streamers and presents wrapped in shiny pink wrapping paper. At ten o�clock I want you to put the television on for the third time today. At eleven o�clock I want you to pick up the phone and start dialing a phone number, only to stop four numbers in and hang up. At midnight I want you to get undressed. I don�t want to see your body now. I don�t want to know how different it is nowadays. At one o�clock I want you to cry yourself to sleep for three hours. Get out of bed and go to the bathroom, throw up, come on you can do it. Vomit up all the memories you had of a good last ten years or so. Throw up all those hearts into the toilet. I want you to go back to bed at a little past four. You may get to sleep now. I want you to have a good night�s rest. I want you to sleep like a baby. Just lay there by yourself with swollen eyes and a bed full of tissues and perspiration. Lay there by yourself and think of me with this birthday cake I�ve saved for you. Remember me. I want you to always remember your first love. I do.

Poinciana � The streets of downtown are covered with sausage wrappers and dried up footsteps. Footsteps that were soaked in whiskey and bad breath the night before. Not well defined footprints, as the people walking were weak. Looking for some sort of escape from the norm. They wanted a Sunday afternoon of headaches and vomit. They wanted to miss the snow I saw at seven this morning. They wanted to miss the cool brisk air this morning I felt standing on the porch watching the beauty of autumn with bloodless eyeballs. Like a shot in the arm the autumn is. It�s like a wake up call. All the fools come out to celebrate something they don�t really understand in the first place. Maybe catch a glimpse of a woman flying around on a broom or something cool like that. Maybe the front bumper of my car will catch their khakis. Maybe their tan khakis will be stained with blood by the end of the week. Maybe their stomachs will have to be pumped. Maybe the women will turn themselves around and start moving forward instead of backwards, Maybe this afternoons melancholy mood will force them all to see the beauty of a clear eyeball on a Sunday morning. The sky looks so great in the morning when your head is on straight, and there is not a drop of blood in your eyes. Your teeth are clean. The autumn feels good to me right now. Cold, and sort of lonely. Content. This sort of calm confidence one gets from time to time. This sort of feeling that comes around once a year. You know it. The unknown. Fear of the unknown. What�s going to happen to me this winter? You ask yourself that every year around this time. It�s always a different answer for everyone though. This winter I want to sit here like right now, and listen to one of the best piano players, who is still thankfully alive, and wonder what next summer will be like.

All the Things You Are - She comes to work every morning, completely oblivious to what she�s going to do to some boy. She comes to work every morning with her little cup of coffee listening to Janes Addiction in the car fumbling with the seta belt and mirror to check her eyeliner. She comes to work every morning in an outfit that�s going to make people talk, and make him talk even more. She comes to work every morning not knowing she was dreamt about the night before. She comes to work every morning after a night in the house on the phone with him arguing. She�s often seen walking like she does. Midway through the day, he needs to stop what he�s doing and come up with some sort of game plan. He often wonders if she really is intimidating, or if it�s just him. He often wonders if she�s just shy, or she�s a bitch. Is she ignoring him? He could probably talk to her, he would love to talk to her, and watch her flip her bangs away from her eyes. He�d also love to flip her bangs away from her eyes, but he has no right to. He has no right to know anything about her. Deep down, he could care less. He knows what she�s about. He knows what would happen. Bullshit does not walk, it talks. He comes to work every morning for one reason nowadays. Basically to see her again and again. She sure does use the bathroom a lot. She sure does use that walk to destroy him. Those brown eyes could look right through him, and he�d never be able to walk again. He�d never be able to look at another woman the same again. He knows her though. He read the book already. He dated her already. He wrote the poems and songs about her already. He knows her all right. He knows everything he needs to know about her and that�s just fine.

It Might As Well Be Spring � Put to the test, and failed yet again. Not really surprising, but what the hell, it was worth a try. I tried the �party scene� again last night. For the past fifteen years or so, I�ve tried it. I always fail. I end up in the room with the most familiar faces and stay there. No point in meeting anyone new at this point. There were some good costumes. A bit disorienting though. I did talk to one stranger, a rather attractive girl in a nightgown, slippers, and what looked like a little bit of red eye shadow. I never did ask her what she was supposed to be. I listened to her talk for a couple minutes though. Ran into her twice the whole night. Me, with this wig of long black hair in my face, a Motorhead shirt and a mouth full of Coca-Cola. Me with no sparkle in my eye. I let her hold on to her drink and lit her cigarette for her. As far as I remember I never ended up saying goodbye to her. I left without even getting her name actually. I think it was a bit symbolic that the only real stranger I talked to was in a white nightgown, you do the math.

I�ll Remember April � Today, sitting in the coffee shop for a few hours reading �The Victim� by Saul Bellow, I put the book down for a few minutes and looked around at the people that were making noise and making the coffee shop money, and thought about something. Sexuality. All these strangers at one time or another are doing things sexually possibly. I�ll have to admit that a few of the women in there gave me some great visuals in my head, on the other hand, it made me a bit ill. Sexual contact is uncomfortable for me sometimes. It�s too close. I really, really, need to know the person to feel ultra comfortable. The strangers and casual friends I�ve been involved with like this from time to time, sure it was pretty nice on one hand. On the other, it�s almost like admitting too much. It makes me sick. The last time I was with someone physically, which was a one-night thing, sort of recently, left me feeling really stupid afterwards. Empty. I felt like I was just going through some motions. I didn�t know this person really, and from what I gathered, she liked it more than I did (unless she was faking it of course�), but I just drove home feeling really strange. This surreal feeling took me over, and I had to pull the car over and get my shit together. I had to stop and think about what I just did. An empty evening. She called me in my deaf ear the next day and I didn�t feel like talking about it. I didn�t want to write an essay on it. It was one empty night after one. So today, I wondered if all these people around me had nights like this. Did the tall brunette with the perfect eyes have empty night like this? Did that construction worker guy with the moustache and Patriots shirt ever feel like this? Is everyone normal but me here? Hello? Anyone there? Does it really start to get boring like that now? Hopefully not, as I feel empty all the time and I want to feel full again. Only one person has made me feel halfway decent about myself in the past year, but I�m here, and she�s there. Irony. It gets me every time.

It�s you or No One � Thinking too much about death again lately. The silly flashes in front of my eyes. Me lying in a hospital bed. Me lying in front of my car, after exiting via windshield. Some big truck down the road with a guilt-ridden driver talking to a policeman. Me lying on the pavement pissed off because I didn�t get to see Bob Dylan a second time.

Old Devil Moon - As redundant as this sounds (I keep telling you all about her), today I got her phone number and address. She didn�t give it to me though; I just looked it up in the phone book. I think tonight I may go by her house and just check some shit out, make sure everything is okay, God knows I don�t want anything to happen to her. I�ll go home and call her 10 times on the phone, and hang up every time. I think she has to like me at this point, I�ve put so much effort into setting up this relationship. I already have our first date planned out in my head, maybe hit the museum, walk around and talk, some coffee, nothing special really. I won�t make a move at her or anything, I don�t want to scare her or anything like that, that would ruin it and she would think I was some sort of creepy guy. I hope she wears something nice though�she looked pretty good today when I saw her, but I hate that new hairdo of

hers, it makes her look �cheap�. I�m debating on just showing up at her house, and knocking on the door with flowers or something. I should wait and introduce myself to her at the pizza shop she works in though. I�ll figure it out tonight. I can�t wait. She�s really gonna like me.

My Funny Valentine � A man pulls into the driveway of his house exhausted from looking at paperwork all day. He opens the virgin white garage door with a click of a button and pulls into the garage. Shiny tools he�s never used immediately surround him. The garage door closes quietly behind him as he makes his way into the house. He unnecessarily turns on the car alarm. His wife fell asleep on the couch three hours ago. The man still feels a little sick from the four vodka-tonics at lunch. He walks past his blonde wife and shuts the television with the remote control. Upon entering the bedroom, he kicks his shoes off. He plops himself down on the bed and turns the television on. The man begins vomiting all over himself. Wolf Blitzer reports from in front of the White House.

What is this Thing Called Love? � In downtown Nashville over the summer I saw everything I needed to see in one day. I was filled with these thoughts of back home, and just getting back home. Not realizing the absurdity of me hanging out in Tennessee of all places, I made my way to this big park. I took pictures of some statues and the sunlight, and the grass and people walking about here and there. This big huge park, and an even bigger blue sky above it, and I was the only one really tasting it it seemed. Perhaps people neglected the park? Maybe the were sick of it already. Maybe it was where the drug dealers and thieves came. I walked at a snails pace. I had nowhere to be. I had no one to call. I walked. I breathed the hot, thick Tennessee oxygen and was content for the first time in months. I didn�t have a single care in the world. Pockets full of money, a stomach full of food, and a brain full of THC. What more could a single thirty year old guy want? I realize companionship is needed for survival. Maybe I�m just soured at this point. Maybe I�m bitter, either way. That day taught me one thing. I loved being by myself, not having to wait for someone while they stop to smell the roses long after I already did. Not have to stand outside of a restroom and wait for my friend/girlfriend to come out. How much time do you think the average person waits in front of a restroom for an acquaintance to come out in their lifetime? Maybe I will get some sort of bonus when I die. �You get three more hours because you didn�t have to wait for anyone to come out of the restroom!� Travelling alone is one of the best things you can do. I would recommend it to anyone. Sure there is a ton of times when you just want to go home. But the good parts far outweigh the bad. Anytime I felt lonely or anything like that I gave myself an excuse to talk to someone to assure myself I wasn�t invisible in a city of strangers. I do that here at home nowadays, as the phone calls are thinner now. I have to assure myself I�m not invisible. Not many people see me now. I quite enjoy the vanishing act I guess, but I will try and make another appearance soon enough. As it stands now, I�ll walk around the park and watch the autumn sunlight reflect off my eyes and wait for next summers outing.

Angel Eyes � I guess at some point it will change and I�ll feel comfortable I guess at some point I�ll understand it all and say �oh, I get it�. For now though, I feel like I don�t want to talk about it. Yup, same old me. Not saying a word. Not doing a thing. Looking around for something every single day. Nothing in particular, just, something. I can�t say I�m completely happy. But I do try and amuse myself day to day with silly little day dreaming at work, and nightly rituals with weights and jazz music. Fortunately, the both of us are similar, and I think it will come around. I�m no shy boy, I�m no lazy boy. I�m a little different from the others I swear to God. Let the other girls be the ones who choose the beggars and thieves. I never wear masks when the girls don�t wear masks. I always give resumes and medical histories when needed. I can�t say I�m a complete angel. But I�ve tried to never let a woman down who didn�t let me down first. Just tell me where it hurts.

before & after