"Infernal Raisins"

I saw myself, and my girfriend saw me, an exhausted man, made so by an injury I sustained in nearly being devoured by my perfidious ex-wife, the egoist. The T-Loc.

My girlfriend succours me, fills my mind with vivid dreams of a Viennese life, teaches me German. My krankenschwester who nourishes my soul and body in equal measure. "You must cleanse your liver of the toxic accretion thirty-three years in the making," she tells me. And so I comply. I drink Epsom salts and olive oil until my stomach draws itself into a fist. I double over from deep enteric pains, chthonic rumblings in a region of myself as alien to me as Bhutan--unseen, visible only through strange cameras on articulated stalks.

My liver floods with bile: the salt and oil work their purgative magic. I renew myself during long stints on the toilet, gasp and moan and make various wet sounds as the abjecta of a lifetime run out of me. My girlfriend and I invent euphemisms for the foul stones that exit my liver: "tender buttons" (neither one of us could stand Gertrude Stein's writing; hence the ironic tribute), "infernal raisins."

I watch them as they leave me, bid them adieu as they swirl down the drain, these infernal raisins, internal raisins, dark as my ex-wife's eyes.

I am cleansed now of all the residua of a life lived constantly on the verge of self-destruction.