Unhoused Woman Encounters Micropenis Energy Outside the Golden Nugget
The sun has yet to set and
here you are, slurring your words.
Your girlfriend is too, but
she is savvy enough
to distance herself from you.
She paces half a block away,
sweaty, arms crossed.
She wanders near and calls
your name, Tad. Why don’t you
leave her be, Tad? Sleep it off,
Tad. Let’s bang it out, Tad.
(Better yet, don’t, Tad.) What
daggers did this dirty-faced,
tattered-trousered grandmother
sling, that sliced you so, Tad?
Was it her cabbage-scented
perfume which seduced you
to bray—swine-like—into
the cheeks of this “Fucking Hag”?
You tower above her, your
fatback moist, your jowls pink
from lack of air to your
middling brain, veins in your neck
and hamhocks bulging. Did she
take your last twenty bucks at
the Blackjack table? Did she
refill all your empties
at the casino bar? Did she
run away with the butcher
when you were six? (And what if
she did? If your dad was
the bore that you are, Tad, I
would too.) And what’s wrong with
these passers-by, who just pass by
you, casting their gaze aside—
myself included?
Like a calf without gold
Like gold without blood
Like blood without creamy fat
Like fat without salt
Like salt without a shaker
Like a Shaker without a psalm
Like psalms without palms
Like palms of plaited brass
Like a brass band without a battlefield
Like a field without cattle
Like a battle without fire
Like fire without air
Like air without the soft slurp
of purple lungs
Like lungs without ribs
Like ribs without tips
Like a tip without a top
Like a top-hat without a song
Like songs without words
Like words without starlight
Like starlight without
the velvet-curtained dark
Like curtains drown the dawn
Like dawn without wings
Like wings without a tail
Like a tail without the comet
Like a comet without ice
Like ice without cream
Like cream without the cow
Like a cow without her calf
bleeding in the grass
A folk healer tends to a sick cow in Muurame, Finland 1929
I haven’t written much (poetry or otherwise) lately. This poem dates from late 2022. I got a new job in Saint Paul, so I packed up a U-Haul with a few house plants and musical instruments and moved in with Leah’s Dad in the suburbs, while Leah finished packing up our place in Chicago. This poem comes from that period; while I was eager to begin a new job and explore a new city, I was certainly missing Leah, missing my friends, missing Chicago. It’s a poem of love and loss and hope.
Kids All Over Hell
Shrewsbury Sentinel Factory children's party (Geoff Charles, 1950)
So anyway, we drove over
to that main drag there
and there’s a bank
and well everything looks closed
and where in the Sam hell?
We’re in the middle of nowhere.
We walk past the VFW
I thought we were goin to the VFW
and we get to some little shop,
like an individual
an individual individualized
little shop
—a bakery!—
Well, we still don’t know
what the hell’s goin on.
We walk into that shop and
BOOM!—
The lights turn on
and there’s all kindsa people,
must’ve been twenty,
twenty-five people there—
your sister’s friends,
Adam called all of ‘em.
And kids all over Hell,
and there was a smorgasbord.
On this day: 12/7/2015
We all make mistakes, we all make friends, we all make a mess. We all clean it up.
Every so often, I’ll dip back into my Morning Pages to find an entry from this day in my history, and reproduce it here. On this particular day, I was flying from Chicago to Florida. Flying is often where I get most of my good writing done, because it offers so few distractions, comparativley. This entry directly sparked my poem “We All”.
Leaving today for Tampa, visiting V’s Mom and Charles there this week. It will be nice to get the hell out of Chicago for a few days of sun and beach. I’m going to do my best to enjoy the trip and not get pulled back into Chicago bullshit for a few days, at least.
Another rejection letter. This time from the SIXFOLD contest, in which a poem is rated against six others, through three rounds of voting by other poets. My “Leatherbacks” didn’t make it past Round 1, earning a score of 3.6 out of 6. Oh well…keep trying. [“The Leatherbacks” later titled “Prey” would eventually be published in Pest Control Issue 2, March 2021]
redemption
<——— Oliver Minnall, 2001Thinking about Brian Kennelly today, as I was telling V about my Navy days. I haven’t thought about him in years—an outrageous character—who roomed with Vincent Mak in “A” School. Mak would become one of my closest friends on the Vinson. Then there’s Oliver Minnall, Mark Howard, Lloyd Colgin, all ghosts from my past. Names with nothing else attached to them. How insane is that? I spent over a year with these guys, hanging out every day. We watched the towers fall together in real time on 9/11, and now all I retain is a faint recollection of their names. Some, not even that much: the hulking MM mechanic with the square, bald head, who I shared a bathroom with, who I was slightly terrified of, who drove me to downtown Charleston one night to party, where we got completely hammered on $5 Long Island Iced Teas, and on the way home I thought I was certainly going to piss myself, and he got into the bathroom first, and Minnall [my roommate] was playing Dreamcast—or whatever game system was en vogue at the time—at 2 in the morning. Or the 1980s movie marathon that I held in our room one weekend, people popping in and out at all times of the day. Jesus. It was another lifetime. Playing sand volleyball on a Sunday afternoon, going to the beach when I was in Prototype—which beach? I know it had a name—drunk on Smirnoff Ice and boogie boarding, and the strap of the thing getting caught between my thighs somehow as a fucking riptide pulled me out to sea, towards the pier. I surely thought I would die that day. Or the other time at the beach, covering myself in Coppertone Classic—essentially COOKING OIL—and falling asleep in the sun, getting burned so badly that my entire forehead erupted into a billion blisters and I looked like Freddy Krueger for two weeks. Or that blonde instructor at Prototype [Timothy Croak, RIP 8/29/2024] who was so goddamn cocky and hated everything and all of us and was the meanest 2nd Class Petty Officer I ever met in the six years I served.
How is it possible that all that exists in this INSTANT?
Staggering to think about, really. Everything goes. Nothing lasts—and we all act as if it really will last forever. Like we have an eternity to do the things we want, like we have all the money to do everything we want. Life is a short bus. Suddenly, all the stress about giving up a full-time job to explore yoga teacher training seems TRIVIAL. But isn’t everything trivial, extended out to a long enough timeline? The older I get, the more convinced I become that trying to make a thing last is the definition of futility, Nothing lasts. That is the only truth I know. Every day we wake up, we are infinitely different than we were the previous day. It’s impossible to remain the same, day in and day out. We are trapped inside these humyn bodies—which is such a relief, because at least we have that as an anchor point—the same face staring back at us from the looking glass each morning; something recognizable. I could wake up tomorrow an accountant living in a remote yurt in Mongolia, and the only thing that would surprise me is if I no longer recognized the face in the mirror.
This hippy, sitting kitty-corner from me has been in his stocking-feet since he sat down; plane still attached to the jetway, baggage still being tossed into the compartment below—stocking-footed. I have to laugh. It’s only a two-hour flight, brah.
Why am I terrified to write what is actually concerning me? You know why. People read over shoulders, that is why. I am a bad person, aren’t I?
No, I am not. This is life.
We all make mistakes, we all make friends, we all make a mess. We all clean it up. We all write. We all swipe left. We all pick our noses when nobody’s looking. We all cry. We all avoid those we don’t want to see. We all seek out those we want. We all drink scotch before noon. We all see our therapists daily. We all take our medicine. We all experience turbulence. We all get cancer. We all kill sheep ritualistically on the Autumnal Equinox. We all stab one another in dark alleyways for 20 cents and a bus pass.
We all sit in crowded airplanes in our stocking feet. We all sing. We all laugh. We all shoot heroin. We all soil ourselves. We’ve all been to Lisbon. We’ve all been to Reykjavik. We’ve all been to the laundromat. We’ve all run a marathon. We all are made of comets. We all are bloodsacks. We all speak to aliens. We all believe in Santa. We all turn our TV on, watch it for hours, and never learn a goddamn thing. We all cook eggs. We all cheat. We all lie. We all roast in the flames of a fire we all built. We all store our dryer lint in a sandwich baggie by the DVDs, so we can use it for kindling to start that fire. We all drink an entire bottle of bourbon by that fire when we should be at home with hubby. We all pet someone else’s kitty behind the ears. We all brag about it later to our friends, or anyone who’ll listen. We all glisten. We all glow. We all shine. We all swim. We all drown.
We all
〰️
We all 〰️
We all believe the Olmecs were the best. We all burn at the stake. We all set the stakes too high. We all play ping pong with the neighbor boy. We all flunk algebra. We all write “poetry” when we’ve had a little too much to drink. We all eat far too much cheese. We all chew our food with our mouths hanging open. We all wish we were cabana boys. We all love fado. We all love Larry David. We all love Donald Trump. We all are gay. We all are Muslim. We all are salmon. We all are Kodiak bears. We all play the bass fiddle in folk-rock bands. We all read magazines when we wait in the lobby for our turn in the dentist’s chair. we all drive Vespas from the café to the lycée with our teeth chattering in the cold. We all watch our friendships die. We all watch our friends die. We all play the radio a little too loudly for our own good.
We all buy houses we can’t possibly afford. We all run up our credit card debt. We all have a 401k. We all get two weeks for vacation. We all sip mimosas on the beach in Cancún as the sun rises. We all black out. We all forget who we are. We all forget who we were. We all forget whomever we were supposed to be. We all regret. We all paint in the style of the modern man. We all get accepted to the Ivy League. We all make six figures. We all winter in Istanbul. We all watch airplanes fall from the sky. We all fly with the angels. We all smoke too much. We all have an app for that. We all Just Do It. We all Enjoy Responsibly. We all refresh our Facebook feeds. We all swim with sharks. We all hunt giraffes. We all know how to sling a sledgehammer. We all have a Hall of Champions. We all have won a Grammy. We all belong in Cooperstown. We all died on the Titanic. We all would love a Toblerone, if you’re offering. We all play Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah” on repeat and cry ourselves to sleep. We all take hemlock when the time comes. We all write our memoirs prematurely. We all snuggle under the covers as we watch our lives slip away. We all hike the AT. We all re-enact the Battle of Bull Run. We all break down screaming on the floors of airports. We all blow our brains out on live TV. We all grunt. We all moan. We all laugh until our sides hurt. We all sing XMas Carols. We all have favorites. We all have enemies. We all have a hard time with it. We all hope for the best. We all prepare for the worst. We all wish we had more time.
We don’t.
November 2024 Recap!
A Pushcart Nomination! A poetry reading! A published essay! Work travel! And more!
A Pushcart Nomination! A poetry reading! A published essay! Work travel! And more!
If I knew then that I would end up spending my whole life behind a keyboard, I’d have gone outside to play.
Order your copy here: https://slipperyelm.findlay.edu/buy-a-copy/
Almost forgot that I recorded this music video at the beginning of the month as well. Check it out below or follow my YouTube channel.
Eight Vehicle Pileup in C-flat Minor, Op. 17
Written at an all-night diner in Silverdale, WA. January 2, 2003
BMX Highway Foxtrot painted December, 2002
Gazing at the cloudless midnight canopy
as my sedan hugs the yellow line,
the grey jelly begins to spark
and stutter
and gyrate
and waltz to Stravinsky
and to Lenin
and to a cello concerto
composed and conducted by Castro.
My eyes suck into the back of my head
as the pangs of oboes
and gongs of jackhammers
fill the hall.
An old hag,
dripping in diamonds,
and fur
and resentment
rises, frowns, mutters, frothing,
stomping on the toes of the nobodies nearby.
Fidel scowls over his shoulder
as the orgasm crescendos—
blows continuously—from the stage,
blares obscenely
at whatever ear dare enter
within its piercing radius.
Like a pestering child with a secret,
the musicians pound on red plastic sand pails,
all the same size,
the same tone,
the same dull thud into thousand-dollar microphones:
THUD
T H U D
T H U D.
In perfect union.
Now the mirrored ball—
plump as Phobos, slow as saplings—
begins its long descent,
and the sound slaps off its surface as it spins,
eviscerating the ear
like a school of piranhas
attacks bloodied Bambi:
Relentlessly.
Mechanically.
And just before blackness falls,
I notice that my sedan isn’t being too friendly with that yellow line.
If Beethoven Owned an iPhone
his symphonies would number not 9, but 2
(perhaps 2 ½, leaving one
“Unfinished” like Bruckner did).
He would check his Twitter mentions
after every performance, scroll
the BBC Music app with each album dropped.
Ghost vibrations would leave incomplete
his Opus 70 Ghost Trio.
Fretting about his branding,
he’d compose and orchestrate his LinkedIn bio.
If his Heiligenstadt Testament
were leaked to Buzzfeed, he’d need to release
a PR video on YouTube,
sit down with Terry Gross,
post pics of his semicolon tattoo.
Conducting his Triple Concerto from the piano,
he might butt-dial that Soprano
he collabed with once, six years ago.
He would totes tote his Zelfie-Schtüken
on his daily walks around @RathausPark.
#NeverNotComposing
He would force his niece
to post TikToks of herself flossing
to his latest mixtape.
On death’s stoop, he’d doomscroll
in a darkened room, puffy undereyes,
shock of iconic hair cast in a sallow blue glow,
pressing the speaker end to his deaf ear,
volume full, feeling fomo
for his protégé’s Première.
#yolo
Marilyn Frankie Blue Eyes California,
too beefy to cram into a single poem
too beefy to cram
into a single poem,
you keep it all
to yourself: these hills,
this desert, this ocean
of need. You invented FOMO;
perfected it, you punchy wretch.
You first and final
vestige of Want,
The Omega / The Alpha /
The Alameda / The Mega /
the weight of your celebrity
dead sinking, sucking through
the silt, tilting the West Coast
into the churning deep.
Sweet Southwest, these San Jacintos
snarl, threaten to roll
you up or under,
to choke you with granite
countertops consume you,
drown you in LA’s flood,
Kubrick’s Shining elevators,
an El Niño of blood.
Marilyn Frankie Blue Balls California,
fatal destination of gold diggers
and punks and prawns,
all seafoam and bubblegum
and white.
Lazer-bleached teeth,
photoshopped, propped
in the Death Valley sun for forty years
white.
Land of cloudless skies and Botox tits,
thundering into your left eardrum
like Saint Paul’s Helter Skelter bass:
a stiff pecker seeking
any warm landing place.
Throwing up, throttling under,
swallowing the whole fucking globe.
FREE CHAIRS!
I found a hundred free chairs
today, while walking from my
motel room to a knockoff
Starbucks. These weren’t
chintzy aluminum
folding chairs, but
fully-loaded, cushioned
armchairs—some with
stains—upholstered in
textured marmalade chenille.
They were really free,
with a sign which read
“FREE CHAIRS!”
out front, that slipped,
rotated ninety degrees,
and is the only reason,
to my mind, that they were all
still there, on the patio
of the downtown Billings DoubleTree.
I thought, for a few strides,
about the many people who
had sat in those chairs
through the years, at
wedding receptions,
optometry conferences,
wakes,
and what stories
the chairs could tell,
but soon got overwhelmed,
and anyway I don’t have
space for even one
free chair.
Disturbing the Peace
Even here, where terriers lag,
their liquid tongues lengthening
towards the grass,
as the shade of catalpas
slides across lush acreage;
even here, amidst muted cheers
for a field goal,
above the shuffle of shoes
aslant a soft lawn at dusk.
Atop the 60-hertz hum of cicadas,
rumbles the crushing current of
rubber across pock-marked pavement,
the sandpaper shift of a school
bus’s transmission,
the skitter of gravel, pealing
behind a rusted ‘96 Saturn SL,
the idling ComEd rig, slouched in an alley,
the scrunch of hubcaps on curb,
the metal-on-metal scrape
of the dumptruck’s brakes, the
bravado of Boeing 737s—sharpening
their approach—one after another,
every thirty seconds, or
the scissory swell of a whirlybird
chopping towards the Edens.
Every silence strangled.
America Answers
So sorry you’re dead
to the Murdered Children of [Insert Latest School Shooting Location Here]
So sorry you’re dead.
Prayers up for your family.
It wasn’t the guns though.
It was the guns.
It wasn’t the bullying.
It was the bullying.
It wasn’t toxic masculinity.
It was toxic masculinity.
It wasn’t the gun lobby.
It was the gun lobby.
It wasn’t social media pressure.
It was all the social media pressure.
It was the guns.
It wasn’t the guns—we need MORE guns.
It was the lack of mental health resources.
It was the lack of background checks.
It was a failure of parenting.
It was violent video games/movies/television.
It was just boys being boys.
IT WASN’T THE GUNS.
IT WAS THE GUNS.
It’s the spineless senators.
It’s the feeble leaders.
It’s the Second Amendment.
It’s your problem, not mine.
It wasn’t personal.
What’s new on Netflix?
We all
We all agree the Olmecs were the best
We all are made of comets.
We all make mistakes, we all make friends, we all make a mess, we all clean it up.
We all stab each other in dark alleyways for twenty-nine bucks and a transfer.
We all just do it. We all enjoy responsibly. We all think outside the bun.
We all stroke someone else’s kitty behind the ears. We all brag about it later to our friends or anyone who’ll listen.
We pace under fluorescent lights. Behind bulletproof glass, we ring up Big Gulps and cellophane-wrapped BLTs.
We swig 5-Hour-ENERGY and climb behind the wheel of big rigs for an all-night hump across the Rockies.
We pull semen-crusted sheets from hotel beds, replenish minibars, sop up soaked bathroom floors.
We pound nails into drywall, scramble along rooftops—sometimes falling. We saw two-by-fours to the centimeter.
Our fingertips prune from holding our hands under scummy dish water, scrubbing sweet and sour sauce from tureens.
We all buy houses we can’t possibly afford. We all make five figures. We all call out sick. We all default on our credit cards.
We all know how to sling a sledgehammer.
We all could win a Grammy. We all belong in Cooperstown. We all died on the Titanic.
We all would love a Toblerone—if you’re offering…
We all roast in the flames of a fire we all built. We all share a bottle of bourbon by that fire when we should be at home with hubby.
We hold these truths to be self-evident.
We mop the corridors, flanked by aluminum lockers, keyrings jangling from belt loops, wishing we were somewhere
else—someone else.
We sweat over boiling fryers and clean grease traps under deep sinks while the moon rides the sky.
We eavesdrop on our fares’ conversations as they pierce our soft bellies with golden spurs.
We breathe in the melon musk of tear-free shampoo as we bathe our babes at the close of day.
We forget who we are. We forget who we were. We forget who we were supposed to be.
We all take hemlock when the moment arrives.
We prepare for the worst.We hope for the best. We wish we had more time. We
