He replies with an impassioned recitation, as if he was standing at the podium, or maybe the lectern, at a reading at the Beverly Hills Barnes & Noble: “Cry heart, black liver, the huge muscles striving to pull tombed bowels.”

I pause in mild shock. Is Hank talking about me? I’ve got huge muscles and my bowels are certainly fucking tombed. I hope my fucking liver isn’t black, though.

“Black brain to stammer in the eye of a blood cry, lungs swelling with a suck-packed soul.”

“Hank, again, fuck your poetry. Where’s my mother? And what happened to the Rienzi Electric guy? Did you eat him?”

“Black furnace of a huge heart loud in the black light of tunnel vision, soul packed into bowels, tongue packed into brain.” Fuck, Hank’s really going at it, and this shit has a whole different tone. It’s fucking obscenely black.

G puts her arm around me and stares intently at Hank. “That’s not his poetry,” she says. “It’s the opening of Ted Hughes’ Crow, I think, but the words are all rearranged like a cut-up. We were talking about it, remember?”

“Yeah. And you were thinking about it and he read your mind, but there’s something wrong with him and he’s got it all screwed up?”