Fighting on the Phone

We talk and talk until I lose the i in it; am left with just one letter that begins my name and it is not enough although i try to make it so by signing every message with this cross. and she is just vibrations in my ear emitted from glass square bright with steel; the ache is much too animal to be of much or real importance. After all as I explained to students just today, the smartest of us homo sapiens declared that we descend from apes. Our second cousins: monkeys, as one 12-year-old explained to me. A surfeit of words and dearth of rancor blots out self, absolving nothing. Hate: at least it cleanses in its spit of heat. All I had: a stunted sense of self and deadened hall, maroon and beige, I realize now I see it like I grew up on that floor. A hall I studied for an hour for the first time in nine months of living here. The walls were beige, the trimming brown, except for one edge which was white. The plainness had no room for rancor but it welcomed words in smug conviction of their hollowed out insides (all the ones we use are soiled and salvaged, used again). Savagely, we find new ways to maul ourselves: the phone, the empty hall outside of an apartment.