When you drink, you drink at a bar, and you drink alone. This is the way since you arrived here. The bartender knows what you want. “Hef or guinness?” The people are loud—especially on SPORTS nights—and touchy. You say a wrong thing and they’re in your face. You say a right thing and they’re crowding you friend-like. Sometimes you’re friend-like, too. Sometimes you’re all grins and charm. Elbows and ass slaps. Then you’re not, and you’re back to quiet, and by now everyone knows. Eyeing bottles on the shelves behind the bar, watching reflections. You’re reminded of one of your first bits of fiction. The girl’s reflection in the bar and the cheesy compliment that somehow wins her over for the night. And her very familiar body, naked, reading the bible. Those things didn’t happen all together, but they were pieces of who you were. Different now than who you are. When someone says, “nothing’s changed,” you don’t want to believe it. Not from yourself or anyone. Sitting at the bar, alone, is what this all comes from. You’re not like this otherwise. You can’t explain it and won’t even try.

What they tell you about plans is expect the worst and hope for the best. Your plans? Being somewhere else. Getting there in unusual ways. Writing it down like this to make something good out of it, because bitterness does not preclude the need to do something good for yourself, for the others. Not many others, but others. You never plan good things that would require another person. That takes the balls to trust they’ll be around, and yours are only so big and so bold. Your balls are to the wall for one reason and no other, and lately too tired to do anything but hang low and lazy. You count the days as PP—post-pussy.

To kill lingering love, you smash it. You beat ever-living shit out of it and shake it loose. Find a vice and ride it hard for a good while. You eat like a king and fuck like they hold a torch to your back. You stop thinking about the plans of two. You retain a decidedly unhealthy interest in the personal life of the one you loved. You want to know where she’s gone, who she’s with now, where she’s going to end up. You stitch together more of her past and try to predict her future. You make a project out of her. You imagine writing her biography. Painting her once a year until the end. Keeping the book, the paintings, all the writings in a safe until your end. Reading a post on a forum she frequents in disguise as a male—for which you cannot blame her, online guys being what they are—you write, ”Chasing pussy is called life.” In defiance, but also because yes, it is true. That is life. This is life. But you never would say it. Maybe not even think it, what with the difference in states. The alone state and the crowded state. The latter’s distractive tendencies are the reason you begin with, “When you drink, you drink at a bar, and you drink alone.”

You walk out again and stumble home again. The boat names—Ti-Ti, Puffin, Heaven’s Betsy—they make you smile. You climb the step ladder. The end of days approaches, you think, unpoetically. Your poetics are dead. Ripped apart in a humid field. Dragged along the dust bowl. Left to rot in the woods. All that remains is you.