To the point of distraction, the walls are cracking. 4am doom—I’m not dead yet, just spinning out— tonguing the subjunctive again. Mythologizing or maybe being annoyingly saccharine, what’s the difference? Full moon above the big white house, stoic. Hundreds of miles from avenues once walked, reading The Woman Destroyed and like okay, fuck. On the day after the day L stopped breathing, it snowed. Late in the season. Ghost in a shell. The shell? Dead. Fine-boned descendant of Marquis de Sade. Kindness. People don’t talk about. Hard to imagine, no more oysters. No more Marlboros shared. Ignore the buzzing phone. Consider: not ready to die. Consider: mouthful of tequila. Something in French, something about. Something lucid. I could never fucking hang. White Clipper flicks. Consider: no fucking white lilies. White powder. Goodness running up shirtsleeves. A body, diseased. Consider: steady hands, salt well, poems. Tidy in mourning. Disheveled in mourning. Spilled cream cheese on Gucci loafers on the crosstown bus. All those fucking lilies. Hard pews. Open casket. Consider: hundreds of blooms.