It was a beautiful day, rainy-gray, foggy, dismal, perfect.
I was so happy because there was nothing to do
and nowhere to go and no one to meet, and never
in my life had I felt so empty and so full. I wanted to sneeze
or to cum. I wanted to die. I wanted a drink,
though I hadn’t had a drink in seventeen years.
But I didn’t really want a drink. I just wanted
to climb a tree that no longer stood where it stood
and hide up there all alone in the top branches
and look down at a world that no longer looked
like it looked. Do you know what I mean? I mean the smell
of the rain before the rain or after the rain
as opposed to the rain itself. I walked up and down
the wet streets, looking at all the houses
that I would never set foot in. So easy to love them,
the shapes of those lives inside, their windows
like the dark eyes of beautiful young girls who are too young
and too beautiful, as forbidden and faraway and impossible as
life on Mars. All the newspapers on Earth clamoring: Life on Mars!