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I wake when I am done sleeping and shamble quietly across the flashing morning into the flashing day, practicing my stutter. And in this manner, I flounder
towards the evening, wearing my shabby ache as camouflage, speechlessly refining my hoax;rehearsing the particular ticks of my impediment; perfecting each nuance of my fallacious handicap,so that I might pass unnoticed. Ignored with an agreeable pity at best, and a subdued contempt at worst.

Head drooped, eyes down, I move through business hours like a wraith, dutifully performing my work in self-imposed seclusion, grateful for the dreary clangor of routine and its pardoning distraction, joyous for habit and its stagnant anonymity.

And thus, contented in my blankness, I move deadpan about my little squirrel cage, perseverant in not thinking or doing what I need not do or think,
presenting myself to review as blandly and innocuously as possible; a dull assertion on the flat plains of boredom, doing my best to incite in others
a want for something greater to observe. Better to look heroically rachitic, but ultimately forgettable. Anything else fosters expectation.

To insinuate grace is to be envied, remembered, discovered. To display any sort of greatness is to be admired for your promise, and inevitably
scorned as a dropout when those who know better watch you fall on your face. To be gifted and fail despite that endowment is a sin; to be thought incapable from the outset is a pardon of divinity, a reprieve from anticipation and its indefatigable quotas, a de facto license to be ordinary, and therefore left alone.

If given the choice, I'd rather appear an impotent fool than implicate ability. I'd rather be dismissed as an idiot than miscarry someone's hope.

There is no real sting in man's neglect, but there is genius in his
disappointment. It's easier to be lonely through laziness and bogus action than default on a genuine attempt, to be convicted by look and word as a
failure to real potential.

So I live my life as a self-inflicted cripple, calculated in my ineptitude, telegraphing my phony hobble to the world, my fraud shoved visibly in the fork of my crutch as I list home to hide and groan about my crime. Not a proper leper, but a penitent coward.

Some waste their days afraid of a nothing, a lack of success.
I am afraid of less: them knowing about it.

I can tell you with stenographer exactness about the line of her cheek, or the nape of her neck. I can parse every minutia in the filigree of pale-gold hair that flashed between the slender calipers of her shoulders. I can relate the precise seismology of each infinitesimal shiver I felt when she first wheeled on the tiny quoins of her heels to look at me, gliding like an iceboat on her delicate points, radiating a smile so warm and sincere it nearly shot me with fright. I can remember each trace of agate in the green of her eyes, the almost startling poise in her voice when she spoke, the number of elegant twists in that thin black knot that tied her blouse about her collar.

I can describe every faultless inch in the russet marches of her skin, every notch in the lissome column of her spine, the impossible symmetry in the small of her back, that ineffable space where muscle cedes to bone and turns its smart profile in the curve of her hips, yielding gently into the stretches of her legs.

I can recall with astonishing accuracy every atom of her I observed, every tremor that drifted past the red of her mouth, every nebulae of beauty that
sparkled between my bashful staring and losses for words. I have memorized it all. And there is no wonder in it. There is no shock in my remembrance,
nor is there any surprise in its vividness.

I saw her, and it was done. It was easy.

A man would be hard-pressed to forget the first time he looked at another human being and saw an enticement to religion. The first time he laid eyes on
a woman and witnessed certain proof of divine creation, evangelized by her mere existence. Beauty in itself is impressive, sweetness alone is fairly memorable, but unforgettable are the whorls in the fingerprints of God.

Unlovable.

She spoke it, and so he was. She meant everything.

It was inarguable as fact. An indisputable truth, a burning, infallible axiom incandescing between the temples, the lobes humming; a tuning fork to whose
pitch and frequency the entire world vibrated at, at the expense of all other sound and motion.

The living breath turned gray in his lungs, his lips went false to all other kisses. His skin stretched dumb and mute over his long, skinny frame;
incredulous to the tracery of sun that speckled his lashes, the music that curled around the lee in his ear, the wind that dusted his eyes and pricked at
the hairs that aped his arms. A darkened, workerless factory, frozen in wait, stripped of its scheme of hot and cold, its geometries of ardor, turned off its maze of appetites, its clues of attacks and caresses shuttling from nerve
to nerve.

Insensate and ignorant, unaware as to what happens outside, folding into some impervious, slumping retreat. Detained in a pallid, texture-less resentment, jailed in some wooly murmur of lies and silences, droning prison-songs to drown out whatever joys might whirl about his face, whatever warmth might smuggle itself past his lonesome watch. All is static and impulsive, like limbs asleep, flickering and erratic but conveying nothing; a ghostly
chrome-a-key image; the weatherman's loud, moray necktie strobing on television.

Deprived of her fickle, cursory touch, he looks for better tools to know her with: jealousy and obsession. A steep, elevated incline of envy and yearning, and a long, lightless fall through her absence. Tumbling down that gap in spirit where the heart once raged and now lies bloodless. Plummeting
downwards to that red, lazy apple beneath, eager to crash intoits vagrancy, sitting useless and empty in the furlough of his chest, unredeemed, dreaming of grass to lay her on, the softness of her flesh, the quench of wine behind the taste of her mouth, the distance between her legs, her hips easing the collision, her body the upholstery between himself and the crime of wanting her.

There is reform in sacrifice, and so he falls unafraid, not caring how many leagues he drops. His skin as pale and uninformative as moon-wooed water; voiceless, only speechless bone and teeth and lonesomeness, impatient to hurl themselves upon the rocks of her dismissal, dense as diamonds and pressure and just as silent, keen on fracturing himself painful and anguished on that great unmoved indifference beneath, so that he might feel something- anything- again.

It's like outsmarting a motorcycle club in an after-hours card game; there is no way to win without getting a fist in my gut, no way to leave victorious without getting my teeth kicked in. It's impossible to walk out on top without receiving some injury for my expertise.

So, for safety's sake, I usually allow myself to lose. Most of the time it's only a little; I keep my antes small. Not enough to bankrupt me, but enough to keep my opponent playing through 'til morning without wanting to break my arm or fracture my knees to get their losses back.

My aim's to keep the game going, to drag things on until the long night's extravagances have given out; when the booze and manic posturing have been poured empty and everyone is permitted to bow out gracefully from fatigue, when everyone's spent and I can slink out with just enough of the rake to get well, but still go unnoticed.

Then I can curl up with my chintzy rollover prize and fumble for sleep, having defused my outward menaces by acting the Fish. Then I can crawl under the sheets and count my handful of coins like sheep, each copper clang a numbered mortgage on some tinny goodnight kiss tomorrow I can't afford today, a mercy smooch from my girl in accounts payable.

But I'm still the restless debtor, laying there, weakly spooning my tepid fortune as I try not to toss around, thinking of that larger mislaid stake, the size of its absence, my erstwhile bookie who always demands a cut. I'm desperate for a dream where my patience and meekness and scheming makes me an achiever, laid with winnings, warm and desirable, colored up to the larger chips; An unconscious hero, running my fingers drowsily down the flanks of my earnings... not some chump playing down to the felt, beholden to an incapacitating, irrevocable trust. I'm tired ofbeing a grinder. I'm tired of playing it close to the belly for the sake of one bad beat a long time ago.

Just once, I want to walk out with the whole pot, the big man.But I can't. No way. I'm still sitting at her table, using her scare cards, bluffing with
confidence she gave me, making my calls on her bankroll. She'll hear about it, and she'll find me. She'll want what was hers, and I'll dispatch my goons to beat it out of me for her. If I make good, she'll come looking for her piece.
And I can't buy her off. Because in my head,I still owe her.
For now, that's the kicker.

Sobriety is palsy, and the only cure drunkenness,
so let heat fuse sand into glass and fill it with wine,
so that we might burn our livers for a drink