provisionally i practically alive mistook signs for signified and so since ive often tried to run them off a cliff like gadarene swine and tied my word ropes in anchor bends wondering whether we were someone better then or maybe just better able to pretend no i don t know if i know though some with certainty insist no certainty exists well i m certain enough of this in the past 14 years there s only one girl i ve kissed in the blistering heat of the asbury pier we sat quiet as monks on the ferris wheel until looking down at the waltzer and out at the sea i asked her do you ever have that recurring fantasy where you push little kids from the tops of the ride and she shook her head no i said oh neither do i and with my grandma s ring i went down on one knee and the subsequent catastrophe has since haunted me like a fiberglass ghost in the attic my inconveniently selective memory as provisionally you mercifully withdrew all the bearing points we thought we knew day s run days set plot our compass shot we sailed waywardly on singing our midnight archer songs until well past dawn it s still dark in the deck of our boat haphazardly blown broken bows our aimless arrow words don t mean a thing so by now i think it s pretty obvious that there s no god and there s definitely a god i dreamt of the rocks at the asbury dunes and that you jumped from the top of the log flume and they gather like wolves on the boardwalk below and they re howling for answers no wolf can know i charged at the waves with a glass in my hand i was tossed like a ball at the bottle stand and i landed beside your remains on the stones where your cold fingers wrapped round my ankle bones maybe ten feet away was a star thousands of times the size of our sun exploding like the tiny balloons you d throw darts at i slept until our chest was full of yarn we spun from shetland wool in socks from where the dorset grows sheared and scoured hours before the rooster crows the price of german silver fell threw this disused thalers down the superstition well2