Shifty drifter adrift in drifting shifts. The hot pavement hard today, so hard to get across. Everything spelled backwards, eyelids sweating, shifty drifters drifting across my bow. Ahoy, drifter! Bugger off!! No ninety degree turns permitted across the double yellow line! i scream in my small voice. i can never be loud, not in sound, at least. Except when i screamed at the battered microphone those few years. i miss that. Where’s the release now, huh. You bastards. Why the always taking everything away. Where’s the return on my investment. What did i ever do to you except ignore, hate, mock behind backs…okay, okay, i get it. i’m not perfect. But i still need to scream. Maybe it’s time to start another punk band. Or carry my milk crate to a new street corner. Where’s my soundproof padded cell for the hurling against walls and the uncontrollable shaking inside. Eight ball corner pocket! Every day is the same. Why is that. Why can’t something happen. i used to make things happen, i think, used to do…things. i remember it like yesterday, or maybe last week. Before the paralysis set in. Yes, before all that. The liquid latex hardening in my veins. The city crushing and shredding. i haven’t submitted anything for publication in months. Fuck it. The entire process stabs at you with slow dehumanizing thrusts. Why should i spend so many of my dwindling hours hunting down tiny unknown publications run by hotshot MFAs only to grovel on the dusty ground before them, eyes averted, my crappy poems clutched in my clackity-clack claws. i might as well just be ripping my bloody heart out and handing it to them instead. To which they’d inevitably respond…

“Dear Writer, thank you so much for sending us your heart. While we enjoyed palpating it, and certainly its slightly swollen left ventricle gave us pause, in the end we didn’t feel that it pumped the right blood type for this particular issue. Best of luck with placing your heart elsewhere. We hope you will consider submitting some of your other organs to us in the future. “

Seeking publication drains all the fun right out of writing. Now i know why Annie Dillard retreated. So much to read! she said. No more time for this frivolity of publication. Maybe i’ll start making zines again. Or just keep typing in this box when the mood strikes. Hug the dictionary to my sunken chest. Scribble dreams in my notebook. Climb into the crow’s nest at Fort Futility and curl up in a ball with my word blanket wrapped tight around me.