Nothing in the catalog has this texture. The poem opens with battery acid and never fully rinses it off: rot kept too long but never chosen, a hug shouldered past as if contact might stain, desire shoved into a gym locker with the dial spun and the code forgotten. Where the Muse poems have historically worked by accumulation of tenderness, this one accumulates residue.

The gum image is the piece’s cruelest and best invention. “A wad of gum / ground into / the bottom / of your shoe / in the alley’s grave” locates the speaker not as a rejected suitor but as something adhesive and unwanted, transferred without consent, scraped at later. He then immediately disowns the portrait: “That version of me— / your version— / not mine.” That two-beat sequence, self-loathing followed by refusal of the self-loathing, is the poem’s actual engine, and it repeats throughout at different amplitudes.

Then the register breaks. “WTF … Holy shit— / Batman. … I’ve been— / BrotherZoned.” A reader trained on the catalog’s usual diction will feel the floor drop. Comic-book slang arrives mid-elegy, and the Joker becomes the speaker’s self-diagnosis: the fool who painted on a smile and believed the room was friendly. The device risks the poem’s dignity and mostly earns the risk, because the joke is at his own expense and because it gives him somewhere to stand that isn’t grief.

What follows is the strongest passage David has written on the economics of devotion. “So what does it cost? / Go ahead— / put a number on it. / Believing in love / when love / doesn’t / look / back.” The answer he gives is not stoic and not wounded. “I’d still pay it. / Every time.” Faith is priced, found expensive, and purchased anyway.

The closing movement is where the draft shows its seams. Elvis leaves the building, the Muse follows his shadow out, the speaker suffers a figurative heart attack and a last stroke, the Joker dies alongside her — and then, without transition, the poem resurrects into “My senses feel. / My heart sees. / Truth.” Then Heaven. Then a question mark placed over Heaven. Then love again, exhausted but not helpless. It reads as several endings tried in sequence rather than one ending arrived at, which is exactly what an unedited draft should look like, and the raw sequence carries a documentary honesty a polished version would lose. Whether that honesty survives publication is a question of what this catalog is for.

Set beside “Death of a Muse” (July 2025), the difference is instructive. That earlier poem mourned a figure who had departed. This one interrogates whether the figure was ever capable of the thing being mourned: “Is my muse / even capable of love— / … / if not me?” The question is unanswered and the catalog is better for it staying that way.

The most emotionally exposed piece in the catalog, and the least governed. Its imagery of corrosion is precise where it counts: the gum in the alley, the gym locker with the joker pasted inside, love so messy the thought of touch required gloves. Those land because they are specific and unflattering to the speaker. The Batman-and-Joker turn is a genuine gamble, tonally jarring by design, and it works because self-mockery gives the poem an exit from pure lament. The cost passage near the end is the strongest writing here, arriving at a position rather than a mood.

The weakness is length and terminal indecision. Four separate endings compete: the Elvis exit, the heart attack, the Truth section, the Heaven question. Each has merit; stacked, they dilute one another. A reader who has followed the poem through its most brutal admission then has to follow it through three more emotional weather systems before release. Trimming to a single close would cost some of the raw-transcript quality David explicitly wants preserved, so the trade is real rather than obvious. Marked as unedited, the piece earns its sprawl. Marked as finished, it would not.