over dinner I give you a lamp and a lazy boy, an electric slothful manifesto. you ask if I want to sleep with others and I say “yes, but not really, not in any meaningful sort of way”, and we laugh like jesus. “how much do you think dying is like living”, I ask. you say “hold on”, with that one finger the way you do, which I would guess will be your own dead end in the end, or as the end, of grace, which is everywhere. the next day you give the lamp to your cat and she uses it to find all her missing cat toys at the back of your closet. it’s back there that she notices your shoes which is when she first figures you for a girl, and because of what she has seen us do, me for a boy. do you ever wonder how other people figure this out. done with it your cat leaves the lamp outside your front door where your guitar strumming neighbor finds it on a sunday. she thinks “music now! musicians unite!” and takes it inside. she sets it beside the bathtub where she sits playing the only song she knows over and over until the guitar neck catches the cord knocking it into the bath and your neighbor dies of broken election promises before the paramedics can susitate her. a big burly guy in his cool outfit susitates her for hours like a frightened rabbit, like the formula for pi, like the peace that night mostly brings, crooners and pendants handed down like elementary school primers, basic lights to lead a way, a lamp, but not for the blind to see, but so we can see those who rob them, which is what the susitator did, he stole the lamp and six months later he put it out on the sidewalk with some other junk to sell and that’s when I stole it back. in my room that night you say “turn that thing off you tired human being”. in the dark then I think, “no, I really don’t want to sleep with anyone else, maybe just touch them a bit, or see them naked in the dark”. I think about that cripple I heard about in a song and the one I read about in the book I was reading that day and realize they are the same cripples, the masochist that I am and all of the same cripples.