“I wish I were someone else. Someone you could rely on to turn it out no matter what. I’m afraid that whatever I had is lost by now. I haven’t had a song out in years. I haven’t had a good day in years. What if I get up there and just completely blow it? Or worse, what if I get up there and give the performance of my sorry life, the best show in the history of me, if the light of the world comes beaming out of me like a bloody Care Bear Stare for the ages, and it’s not good enough? If you lot somehow hear in my voice all the worst of us?”

Marry me, and we’ll make a little bubble universe where nothing has to change and the elections never happened and it’s just Arkable Us, neon against the night, ice cream against the world.

I promise never to skip school again, just come back. It’s lonely being the last of us. I wish I could fix it all. I wish I could have been better. That’s all. I just wish I was better.

“When the aliens come, there’ll be one queue to fight them and one queue to fuck them, and the second one’ll be longer by light years.”

…their favorite children and their ailing parents singing a duet about how much and how desperately they needed them.

It blossomed all over again into cosmic grief at the ultimate impossibility of communication between two living beings.

I can’t wait for your monarchs to decide to hide it, lose control of the narrative, deny the evidence, call me a weather balloon, confess and resign, and finally leak a half-redacted version of what I tried to say to a newspaper friendly to one faction or another.

You’re just shy of figuring out how to shuffle your horde of hormone-curdled control-obsessed malignant narcissists offworld.

I’ll put this in words you can understand: humans are hideous, pain-guzzling, pollution-spouting space monsters who might threaten our way of life.