have fantasized that he now saw the world through the eyes of some special beast. But he was not a man of images. The house in which his family had lived for sixteen years was empty. There was a realtor’s FOR SALE sign on the unmowed

it did little to dissipate the dimness through which he marked his progress. Had he been a man of images, he might

to a party. He went because they asked him. He paid a dollar at the door: a woman who had her left breast removed for what he found out later were non-carcinogenic reasons, took the money. She was topless;

and

the dark water seeped through him till he was limp and dying. Then his head broke water. He was in an underground cavern. He spewed out mouthfuls

landscape littered with the refuse of a misspent youth. All my gods and goddesses had feet of shit, and there they lie, like Etruscan statuary, the noses bashed off. Believe me, Berta, you don’t want into my world.”

You see before you the last of the cynics, the last of the misogynists, the last of the bitter men. I look out on a

Lizette and I were the two sides of the same coin; devalued and impossible to spend. Legal tender of nations long since vanished, no longer even names on the cracked papyrus of cartographers’ maps.

julep