Being alive is a good thing.
But I don’t feel alive.
Sometimes, I feel dead.
I go and walk the street.
Sometimes I think I’ve lived
a long succession of lives on this planet
and that I am not young anymore
and it is good to think sometimes
I might be someplace better
in my next life. Sometimes I think
I’m in hell and being punished,
that everyone else is an illusion.
Sometimes I have these dreams.
He spoke with God sometimes,
when he was stoned.
Sometimes I think my father wants to throw me out.
He could feel himself drifting
upwards, through the ceiling.
That happened sometimes,
he’d found, when you inhaled
too much of the bitter smoke.
Sometimes, he listened
on his red and black headphones
to the song “Shimmer.”
An odd, gnarled tree
stood next to him
against the high, stone wall,
like a corpse. He thought
this man might be
his father, glaring down at him.
But the corpse kept him company,
so Paul poured a drink for him onto the ground.
Sorry, I do that sometimes.
Sometimes I say some crazy shit.
Don’t know why.
I told Laura that
I told Dr. Nichols there is a triad
of hero / victim / perpetrator
and I sometimes feel like all three.
I think we all are.
Our shouting made me realize
people other than me are suffering.
I am shocked by my capacity
to let my delusions make me
be cruel to people I love. I said,
because the barrier that separates
this world from the next
one is formed of something
immutable, we can never
understand ourselves any more
than we can understand why
the world is the way it is.
In effect you are longing
for something that is so fitting
to the human condition
that it is impossible to attain
/ not afraid of death. hey,
sorry about anything bad I’ve done
enjoy the mild weather

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Note: “Stuart’s Sentences” is composed of sentences pulled from emails, stories, and essays written by my brother, Stuart Hunt (1982–2019). The diction, syntax, and phrasing of each sentence is preserved; I sequenced them and applied line breaks.