September (Guest Posts)

Nuclear Sun

A Gyre to geld my baby in any which way

To maim my offspring in any season

A crime, though posh, a crime.

To venture to harm my baby,

Enterprising to injure my child,

Is to re-do it all, all your work in life,

Like coming back in a circle to the beginning.

That state where it’s all dicey.

No clothes, no money, no wares.

That stage before you were a baby, all dark

To touch my child is a gyre.

My child is my throne, my sword, my wares,

Entire life earnings for his arrival and triumph,

Upheaval of his ascendancy would cause brouhaha

Like that of the explosion of a nuclear sun.

Your existence would come full circle

Don’t trip my baby’s angel hurdles

I’ve tried and failed and not for naught

A kinglike throne of legal tender shines with the energy, awaits,

Grant me a boon and harass elsewhere

Or stay and introduce yourself to my fist, your terminus,

Punctuated with interrobangs.

To disturb my baby is to plunge yourself in the unforgiving star

The fierce mental ignition at the start and finish, Gyre.

Economics

I have this theory. This theory involves a little bit of Economics. Bear with me.

I've begun measuring masculinity in terms of deadweight loss to society. Deadweight loss to society of course meaning dead time in this case. Like in a football match there are all those seconds that are devoted to a trot, a swagger, an over-the-shooulder glance, and no game. The same thing happens with people of course. Quotidian vaults of dead seconds amass and I'm becoming more and more keenly aware of their presence. I am attempting to suss out the facts and determine the root causes. Here's one:

Excess masculinity leads to deadweight loss to society. How?

Well, I am defining masculinity here to be a lack of consideration for others coupled with a heightened sense of aloofness/obliviousness.

What's interesting is that you find a lot of masculinity in Economics lectures-- especially in large ones. For an individual that sits near the front of a lecture hall it takes an astounding amount of manuevering, pleading, and general squirrely-ness to exit near the back of the lecture hall. Pretty many conversations such as these impede such individuals from moving along their desired path at their desired speed:

"Yaoooo. Where you gettin lunch at?"
*scratches stomach, yawns* "I don't know man."
"Cascadeli?"
*looks around, fixes hat* "Sure."
*yawns, scratches, sways.* "We out."

All the while the future head of the IMF is standing behind the towering individuals, poking his head around the pair looking for an alternate route and stammering something inaudible to them.

Frequently adorning the aisles are large individuals that simply stand. No conversation is taking place, but it appears as though the map of the day, or the schedule of the day, rather, is flashing through the mind of the large individual. He holds fast to the straps of his backpack, arches his back, and he contemplatively examines the ceiling. This man is a major obstacle in the aisle and he takes no notice of the individuals quickly becoming congestion behind his back.

What I find interesting here is to think of the rapidly expanding conglomeration of dead seconds. Say there are 15 individuals angrily jammed into place behind the large, ponderous man. Each of those individuals loses 10 seconds. That is a net loss of 150 seconds to society due to the sheer and complete obliviousness of the planning man. Imagine that similar occurences (dialogues and musing men) happen thrice in one exit. That's 450 dead seconds.  This lecture meets three times per week. That's 1,350 seconds per week. 14 week semesters? 18,900 seconds. 315 minutes of cost imposed upon the individuals forgotten behind the back. And, imagine that this happens in two classes! And, imagine that this happens elsewhere--in dining halls, libraries, on the sidewalks, in financial aid offices! Then, in the real world (post offices, blah, etc...)!

Quite a hefty sum of seconds quickly becomes lost to everyday tasks and general joy that one could and should be partaking in.

There are a few simple steps I take in order to mitigate this externality:

1) rudeness: if you value and understand the sheer weight of these numbers and think about it, you, much like myself, might begin simply shouting at people instead of allowing them to partake in the absent minded reveries of a sleepy afternoon, morning, whenever. When I see a large ponderous man I don't timidly beg him pardon, I demand pardon. "EXCUSE YOU" becomes an important phrase in my arsenal. Normally, such things impose social costs upon you. You don't want to be perceived as a rude person, correct? Well, that is only because you are not rationally thinking about the costs that the individual is imposing upon you. When you think about it in a larger context, perhaps you may get angry.

2) finger snapping: When I see a person about to veer off in front of me in a hallway and place an unwarranted and unsolicited damper on my original pace, I snap my fingers. Loud. Multiple times. Then, they look and see what is happening, and my trot takes precedence.

I suppose what must happen is you fight aloofness and obliviousness (which I have defined as masculinity) with an overpowering masculinity. You must not care about the social costs of being a rude person. Actually, you must revel in it. You must maliciously grin as you plow your way through conversation upon conversation about food and crazy weekends. You must hold your net high and collect those seconds that so rightly belong to you and put them to use!!!!

Tiocfaidh ar la!

Swordfish

At the table I was adrift in the sea of gentle delicacies on the plate and palates of the dinner guests. "Ayn Rand was a genuis!" Person 3.0 says under his assortment of fine cheeses and crumbly bread. Their shirts are buttoned and collared; the lights are dim--ominous. In my silence I look for their eyes to question my placement at the table. They are physicists, they are lawyers, they are mystics and wise in their ether-reality. The lights go dimmer and person 1.2 gives a toast to the marriage that I knew nothing of— that is, until the toast. I look down at my plate of swordfish encircled with a granular sauce that is green and smells or tastes like life itself. I've never tasted this before. The toast ends and I look back up.

They eat, they pay; I walk in observation back to the train with the lingering feelings of firm handshakes and "It was my pleasure"s all around. And then I am there. I am back at my college, I am playing an invented drinking game; I am losing, badly. The swordfish for dinner makes my tummy rumble and the game makes my head come out of my belly then throw the ping pong ball. The college seniors gather around ye flattened table with litters of cups and gallons of liquor and scream and play and play; we are in a state of play.

"The best game since Pong!"
"No it's way better than Pong. Pong is pussy shit compared to this!"
"You're right, what am I saying? Drink that rum dude, you lost!"

Hahas, many hahas, circumnavigate my ear and eye and pink finger that stretches and points to the table. The light is there and not, and is anything really happening in those heads or in my cup? Who said that stuff? What is this game?

And I am there. I am being kicked out of an on campus party, because of the RAs, and making arrangements to pick up cocaine, though I don't snort cocaine and have only the exact amount the dealer has named as his price. He speaks terms and weights and I nod and invite him out to a party. His little neck bends downward and to the right then the left and avoids my little eyes. It is as if his profession has made him "sketchy" as if he is hoping to avoid a police sketch and is wiggling away slowly and gently from a fate that is destined.

We are there; we are...at a sophomore dorm on a bed. I have her in my arms and he lies in front of her, sleeping sleepy sleeps. This “her” and this “he” are illusory. They walked with me, they took me back to “his” place and he dreams now as she grins.

"You have a boyfriend and I am a spoon. I am a tool. Use me, whatever."
"You're the big spoon; I'm the little spoon." She says with her raspy voice, her person 0.85 voice. Her words barely come to me, they nearly get lost in some scene three years or five minutes ago.

"That isn't what I mean. Come here." I don't resist the time before now, I go to it, and as my lips push onto hers I think about the swordfish and the growling of my stomach.
"What do you want?" Persona 0.85 asks--vowels withering and body squirming.
"I don't want anything."

There I am, right there, on the walk home with the dawn squirting water onto my squeaky shoes and I spot two boys walking, smoking, walking, looking down.

"Hey, hey! Can I buy a cigarette?" I ask pulling out a condom.
"No." Person 0.3 says to me.

I stand still watching them walk away through a spinning world.

The grass palms my head and the sky pushes clouds steadily to death like the snows of yesteryear. I am, or turn into, the day before when I sent her, my swordfish, my love. And she, my world traveler said nothing. She says nothing. She is my nothing. Person 0.0 slept in the grass, and person 0.0 went to the womb then the tomb then to class thinking about the swordfish. And the days repeated.

The phone dialed, the phone hung up, the phone dialed and shut, and voicemailed once more at class or in the grass or somewhere in that night two years ago. Two years ago, I had swordfish for the first time. This cyclic progression of scenes leads me to the painful admittance that has to burst, has to erupt one day soon. “I don't want anything!” I will eternally, politely want to scream to my swordfish, but I cannot. And the days repeated.

A page in the newspaper

Heat rising in those glossy wooden eyes
perpetuates this era on the stoop
for the day, or the year, the iris is eternal in words,
and "stoop kids never leave the stoop"
We should say, but don't
and the wood creaks
under the cores of endless rambling nouns, adjectives
verbs; we are static
and buzzing

While the maggots amongst the commas
Run-on to new domains that neither of us are aware of.

Come back.

"He died"
you say before I say
with the resonating giggle of the preceding  paragraphs
But the words float away from the oak
and there's another creak.

Stoop kids never leave the stoop.
We sit for moments that are eons
with thoughts that are pictures
of obituaries
and we smile, hoping to bring back
the giggles from the past few pages.

Gap Tooth Grin

From the looks of it I can surmise:
A toothpick was wedged real hard inside,

Divorcing those chiclets all pearly and white
Leaving grotesque that uncomely sight.

Lawrence Fishburne never did see...
A space so wide, unfettered, and free.

Some, I suppose, may name me a dick,
but through that gap Charlie Brown could kick

A prolate spheroid all swaddled in pig--
Under the mast posts this fucker does a jig.

Sidewalk trenches can't compare!
To this slice of thick, pure air!

Continental Drift made continents flow
but the Pacific is sad, seeing how this gap grows.

It's Zeno's paradox, perhaps in reverse,
To a postprandial pick he has become averse.

For, he knows all, and he knows why...
He knows the folly of a vigorous pry.

Perhaps Gimli's axe has split them asunder!
Or nature, that foe, made a grave blunder!

Either way, matters not, I think I shall quit.
This poem is as long as those chiclets are split.

--To my own soul I dedicate
--The first true work
--Of my life.

Poet in BK yada yada yada..

Do you ever feel like a paper bag?
So hollow, so deep...
With a fate entrusted to the
winds,
and death by aimless, leaden feet?

Ready to soar, soar, soar..
Ready to die, die, die..

A member of the Fall foliage?
Part of the debris.

Floating among the clouds?
Embedded in the street.

Do you ever feel like a paper bag?

Do you ever feel like a paper bag?

Fuck Poetry

Listen!

Enough of this poetry SHIT.
Who the fuck
ever
decided that dumb little lines
all fragmented
and s p a c e d out
in meaningful ways,
is an art form?
I, for one, am completely opposed to it all.
To long, skinny stanzas,
to supposedly beautiful comparisons,
to "new ways of seeing things."
Fuck it all.
Write some prose,
you
little
shit
stick.

With a hate more furious than all the Medeas of the world,
and with aspersions more weighty than all the dice cast
in sin city,
I spew vitriol into the leaden tomes of the supposed
Fore Fathers
of this great language
my tired lips
struggle to transmute.

You won't see me on street corners
reciting lines
of poetry
about
whatever the fuck
poetry likes to say.

bitch.

"5's on that chair"

My soul cooked the liver
baked the brain tissue
fried the remainder of the heart,
a serving juiced with drops of type O blood,
sprinkled with ethanol sweat,
and served at the Devil's empty chair.

The seat is still flaming, the town is too,
but the Devil is gone
on break
be back in five minutes
to move on from the appetizer--
the appetizer I'm so happy he ate first
and I wish he would digest quickly
I do. I wish.

I can still see his stomach lining
and almost through it
and at the disappointed glances of his dinner guests
But I was deliciously salty from tears
and crunchy.
Surely She thought me perfectly crunchy.
I had to be.

And from outside the guests' raw meninges
blood is dripping from the dinner table to their sandals.
Rare.
And they prettily exchange facts of the day
while someone snatches an early nibble
on my ear.
It would have tickled.
The Devil's empty chair looms at the end of the table
and everyone wonders what happened--
what happened to God's empty chair.
He didn't call 5's.

5: Reflections on the ground

I sold my banjo for beer and Raman
Fifty dollars for the granular crunch
that sticks between the teeth
reminding for days that it's uncooked
uncensored, unrequited desire.

But when I was five,
five, five. Five and smiling on jungle gyms
With sun sticking to my forehead
and dirt clinging to my socks
I walked past the cans and plastic wrappers
that today I grope for
and all the day I let memories of string sounds slip through
groggy wooden ears.
And at 5, everyday, walking home,
I listened to the bitter chords being struck.

I sold my banjo for beer cans and Raman bags
that now lay empty on my apartment floor
and the riffs aren't going, the floor not creaking from dance
in fact, it barely moves.

The floor doesn't sing songs to silent bodies or screaming souls
It's too noisy.

But when I was five they pounded and laughed--
Heavy sighs and crater sized cracks
But when I was five the strings set me off balance--
space-walk life with all the giggles loosely hanging off the sides
But when I was five!
But when I was five?
When I was five
I was a stupid little kid.

Shit and Champagne

Broken bones under a leaden pallet

Under the shivering night’s curtain led me along

Down the chalk sidewalk

Into this spotty existence that came about when I met you

My spot is in the windowsill on the fourth floor

And below you stand and stare

Wondering what I’ll do,

If I’ll do.

And the crimson boiled skin from a night of five dollar beers

And ass grabbing—smacks

Still doesn’t make you think,

I want you to stop feeling.
I want to stop feeling.

“Naivete” you say, you said, you’ll say

I can see it in your eyes through the dark,

As your pores and teeth and perfection absorb me.

Now, Penelope,

Spotty vision taps my spine and tells it to spill

And I can almost see your face covered with specs of gray  and red

“You’re shit, I’m champagne.”
Period.
Exclamation?
No, period.

This leap of faith from the window sill was destined for the cyclical

Will you catch me one coffee date?
One afternoon at the beach, one internet moment, one hijacked plane?

Spinal tap, spotty boiling, red, gray

Gray gray gray

Filling the crevices of fingernails and eye-sockets and...
no time to see your skin,
you step back,
Nostalgia for the window sill moment.

Feeling, a life.

ConLaw Kid (absorb)

The heavy bench beneath my buttocks keeps me from falling through for a moment. "So this is grounding," I think. "This is what I need." The clouds slowly wade over head into some shape I won't look at. I'm scared of the sight and sights in the sights, the textures in textures. What do I even mean?


A law student walks out of the Law Library, capital L, capital waiting at the end of a few hundred more of these walks he'll take to the dining hall then take to the graduation ceremony. I want to be his shoes. They're moist, because all law shoes are moist. The pressure makes the feet piss themselves, over and over again, until the toes are grandmothers and the shoes become Prada. I think I'll be their shoes one day, but today the bench keeps me grounded, or really, elevated above the ground. I like this state of being.

I wiggle my hat a little as the law student passes. "Spare change for a wealthy law student? Spare change!?" I have money and I always have. In a way I despise these people who want money. They don't know what it's like. They don't know how pathetic it is to be a predator searching for green papers to pay rent or debt, or some other silly concept. The student, in my ConLaw class, five foot seven, about 27 but with gray hairs, looks at me as if unsure as to what I said. He knows what I said. I yelled. it.

"Spare change for a wealthy man? Please suh can I have some moreeeee?!! Put your quarter or fifty in my hat, pleaseee."

"Um do you really need it?" The eyes twitch a bit and he looks back as if hoping to see an exit sign from the situation. None in sight.

"Need? Weird question. Do you not want to help? You see a fellow student asking for your hand to come and rescue them and you ask about need. I need this to happen. Please. Give it to me. Please, please, please, please."

I grab his eyes with mine and clutch them mercilessly, and he cannot look away, slither out of me. Come into this. Oh you're here.  His eyes begin to water a bit and I know those lids wish to close and block me out, let my bench absorb me, the sky collide into me, darkness. Nay say me.

"Okay, fine." He reaches into his wallet that is leather and slightly cracked and full of business cards from all of his prostituting. As he hands me a crisp twenty dollar bill I do my best to give him my most gracious smile: a mild smirk. I get his eyes again, and he backs away, quickly, back into the law library. Hit the books kid.