AT LEAST you were good for something.

Crossword puzzles and pornography.

 

I think only of failure—failure meticulously misplaced amid the unpaid bills and unfinished crossword puzzles that lie stacked in rows across the cedar chest. "Here lie copies innumerable of constant conundrums and miscalculations corrected by identical miscalculations." In the basement there are boxes chronically filled and refilled with stable feelings of instability. An innumerable numbness is buried in ink and drowns in shut-off notices, which cackle at the ceiling and evaporate through the gaps and window cracks in the holey walls of The Booby Trap. The air forms invisible patterns of dots that fail to connect. These are the countless errors in the clues I fail to correct. I think of failure in couplets of quarters and grammatically incorrect corrections; in the fallen sense that I consistently waste every quarter on incomplete and completely illegible attempts to make cents of nonsense.

I bury every one of those couplets in a pauper's grave, under bills unpaid—bills that serve only to leave doors unlocked and lights on. I bury those bills confused with notices of debts I perpetuately fail to pay; this failure seeps through holes in half-assed attempts to correct mistakes I did not know were made.

"We ride whales and drag race time in search of what? There is no heaven with roads paved in gold; there is only a house within which water turns to blood."

Reviews

[Steven]

Oh, the starving artist... Nothing is new under the sun. Simply the names change. But all the pain is still real. The Booby Trap, what a name for an apartment. But it fits well. Just as your other piece made clear.

"I think of failure in couplets of quarters and grammatically incorrect corrections; in the fallen sense that I consistently waste every quarter on incomplete and completely illegible attempts to make cents of nonsense."

Again, great word-play. The artist's pain projected through a medium of art, here prose/ poetry, seeking not just to pay the bills with this craft, but also to pay the debts incurred over a lifetime of grief. To show the soul on a page and to have it loved. Excellent writing.

[richard hurndall]

This is rather depressing, but I really like it.

It's so short, but you sum up a lot about this person's life in a few short paragraphs. The crossword analogy is quite brutal.

'There is only a house within which water turns to blood.' Brutal.