One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

-- Elizabeth Bishop

In Cold Blood

"Hell, Don, don't make me act the hypocrite with you. Throw a load of bull--how sorry I am, how all I want to do now is crawl on my knees and pray. That stuff don't ring with me. I can't accept overnight what I've always denied. The truth is, you've done more for me than any what you call God ever has. Or ever will. By writing to me, by signing yourself 'friend.' When I had no friends...I don't know why I should die among strangers. Let a bunch of prairiebillys stand around and watch me strangle. Shit. I ought to kill myself first... Just unscrew the bulb and smash it and cut my wrists. That's what I ought to do. While you're still here. Somebody who cares about me a little bit."

[291-2]

a nervous condition

I was eating French fries while my mother died. I know this for a fact 'cause they told me the exact time she croaked the next day. 7:47, I think. Anyways, I was at McDonalds pumping out a ketchup refill while the blood froze in her veins and her body shriveled up so brittle you could snap her pinkies like Slim Jims. That's the line I use when nosy people ask me why I wasn't there at the foot of her bed, weeping and wailing and what not. The conversation almost always ends there, but I don't feel like it was worth it unless they never come within ten feet of me again. 'Cause you're never freer than when you know everybody hates you. And I was thinking just that when I walked into the room full of mourners in pajama pants stained with special sauce, turds of ground beef on my sweatshirt, greasy fingers and onion breath. I weighed about 200 pounds at the time so I doubt anyone needed much convincing that I was a pig, but tonight I was going for the jugular.

"Hey! Want some coffee?" I asked a puffy-eyed cousin. 

By the end of the night I had nothing to lose and I felt it harder than I'd ever felt anything. There soon would be freedom in black and white but even then it would never distill the loss that hung in the air around me like thunderclouds refusing to rain.

But I'm not sorry. And I'm not sorry for being a cold bitch about it or whatever you assholes wanna call me for drowning my screams in a deep fryer. I'd been doing that for years during better times anyway, and anyway this isn't about her. Yeah, I knew from the moment I saw the corpse that I was finally free, but that's just where shit got started. My story isn't about some poor bastard dying before their time, but about my escape. And his.

That night, after the weepies finally left and the EMTs took the Missus for her final stroll out the door, I went to the beach. I broke down and slept in the sand. The next morning I was delighted to discover that I hadn't been murdered, raped or even mugged.

I was 18 when my mother died. This was in 2003. She had been diagnosed with cancer of the whatever a few months before and she was already a foul smelling walking skeleton. I stayed out of the house as much as I could and went as far as my flabby legs took me. Unfortunately for my fat ass it wasn't that often or that far that I could. Even though I was now technically an adult I was still in high school and living off Mom's unemployment checks. Being as she looked like a postcard from Auschwitz with the strength and authority of a titmouse, Mom was smart enough to abandon intimidation tactics and cleverly wielded her financial control over me in a passive-aggressive manner that succeeded in keeping me in line. And she maintained her grip even towards the end. Even so, there were times when her efforts were rendered futile, such as the commemoration of the day St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland, which, in our town, is also the commemoration of the day we drove the British out of America (pardon my redudancy) and a day off from school. This year, she spent that day at the treatment center. I went to the library, walked around the park and finally gave into my daily ritual of McDonald's, while the rest of the city drank itself into the gutter. Mom might have had a beer had she been able to keep it down and I might have had some had I any friends to drink it with. The latter was an issue, despite the poison seething in her veins, that she always had the energy to harass me about despite the fact that she herself hadn't spoken to another soul other than me on a regular basis for over a year.

But even if I had been class president, I doubt that my mother's aspirations for my public life would have been satiated. "You look like shit," she pronounced one morning over breakfast like Newton under the apple tree. She had been studying me for a long time, but hadn't figured out what it was about me that made her feel so uneasy. True, my personality left much to be desired, I was failing most of my classes and possessed no recognizable talent--all in all she was stuck with a daughter with the potential and promise of an earthworm to carry on her legacy. Still, there was an additional ephemeral quality of fuckedupness, that prior to that moment she had been unable to articulate.

Slutkiss Girls

impressive instant

The Obese Carrot stumbled down the cobblestone. The beautiful, aching loneliness. Sleeping on the sidewalk in between the cobblestones. The confusion of the incongruous faces; not belonging anywhere. There is nothing worse than everyone around you screaming how powerful you all are when you know. Perfectly well. That you have none.

When I was in the street and perceived the instant that I may very well die, well darling, I went to a very dark place. A tiny corner of the universe. I curled my whole psychic being up into the infinitesimally invisible space of death. A black pebble on a white beach. I didn't see my life before my eyes. I saw my life--its entirety--in a soggy grain of the sand bar. As wet and pliable as my vulva on our wedding night. Salty as your tongue. Salt water, a part of that one molecule that stretches from Maine to Spain. Or maybe I was the black pupil of the seagull. The seagull floating on top of that molecule. The seal swirling beneath. The cormorant. The sand shark. The piper. The worms, those terrifying alien larvae with hooks for heads that we fed to blue fish, dashing towards the shore in masses like a sea of horny salmon, that one summer so long ago.

Duende of the Allergy

the stupidity of the human body
apparent in even the best of our breed
worst in Darwin's rejects
in this day and age
kept alive by God killers
not meant to live
only the stupid body knows
Lord only knows how stupid our souls
the wisdom of our stupid bodies
the itch at the beauty of spring
responds to majestic fall with mucous
chokes wheezes struggles to rid itself of the world
the disconnect between mind and body
the stupid mind thinks it deserves
it wants the world
wants to pet the puppy
wants to savor shrimp
to smell the flowers
to lie in the grass
to kick up dust to inhale dust of old books in the attic
to love the world
and sometimes
the stupidest bodies would rather self-destruct
than surrender to a peanut butter kiss

bites at the thighs
swims in the veins
rivers of purple red and blue
they will dry up someday
shrink like a raisin in the sun
and hard as
and you will be cold