Angxious

All but pitch, the bathroom has natural light
cascading like the most half-hearted trickle of piss.
The kind with as much pressure as an ant crawling
across unaware skin, in through the window over the shower.

The pounding is in my head,
like the heartbeats of Jim and David’s little China Girl, “loud as thunder.”
The digital green flash of AM 12:00,
AM 12:00,
AM 12:00,
AM 12:00,
the steady Indiglo metronome compliments and mirrors my conflict internal.

It, the woe, comes in flashes, the woe.
It screams don’t marry him.
It screams I am destitute.
It screams give up.
It screams let me put it in there.
It screams my kingdom for a cheeseburger.

With a hackneyed grip of either side of the bathroom sink,

I pray for sleep and calm.
I pray for solace and understanding.
I pray for closure.
I pray to the big fat unknown standing in the nudity of eternal darkness.
I pray for answers.
I pray
“just to make it today.”

Detroit Cock City

Like a chore, like a necessary evil in stagnant July air, I lift my balls like a house frau lifts a rug to vacuum beneath it. Death Valley asphalt heat rolls off, volcanic microwave steam wafting up into the darkness of the room, hot with two light breezes, one manmade and one of more of a natural origin. They sweep through the place as if they are afraid to touch my nuts and me; to give us the grace of their cooling embrace and they cannot be blamed. They’re just doing their job, albeit poorly.

My right hand, a mother’s cradling arms of thoughtful separation, attempts to shelter and give ease to the acids and bases-effect of skin-on-skin. Women thankfully will never understand what it’s like to have to peel the flesh of the sack off of an inner thigh on a night like this one, an experience not unlike and definitely akin to dealing with the most stubborn Velcro. Do it too fast and you’ve involuntarily waxed yourself. You’ll want to scream like hostages do in movies when the duct tape gags have been stripped off their faces.

Tal Como éramos

Memory is an apparition of attrition, it spends like tokens at a car wash or arcade,
pragmatic and purposeful or urgent and impulsive.

If it’s true then I’m a collector of ghost coinage. Folder upon mental folder, teaming with ducats and doubloons
that I thumb over
like a parent with a photo album of an outlived child.

Things you can’t get back, reeking so much of regret
that you can’t help but gag and choke up.
Emotional onion slicing, you know what fumes will do, but you push the cutlery on through anyway.

Nostalgia, an ambrosia, flows so freely that the damned inundation can’t ever hoped to be dammed.

The Girlfriend’s Birthday Party

Baked chums around a patio table, high in her backyard, contemplate the macro to the micro. Such deep discussions, punctuated with Simpsons’ quotations and other miscellanea shrouded in obscurity, are softballs lobbed so carefree.

Shake, the crumbs of emerald buds, stare up at us from the tempered glass surface as another joint is being rolled while the blur takes hold and no longer are we mid-to-late twenty-somethings still acting like teens, we’re kids with contact lenses of slurred imagination playing eye-spy around such a maudlin landscape or at least I am.

As if action figure were in hand, all I see are a miniature amalgam of a distorted metropolis, post-apocalyptic. Clotheslines, now power lines, stretch out into the darkened distance, while an old clothes hamper has morphed into a fucking skyscraper, the BBQ? A crematorium. Plant watering pot cum water tower nestles the neck of a water cooler bottle brimming with cigarette butts suspended in light tar-hued-nicotine swill. It has all the charm of a terranean sewer system; complete with an ashcan underneath as the foundation almost giving it the credence it needs to exist. This inversion brings itself to the forefront of conversation as a potential candidate for an anti-tobacco PSA.

We laugh the laugh of ages, a deep rumbling of seismic hilarity that shakes those around that know not of what we speak in our cottonmouth tongue, our humorous tremors carve more of an age gorge than just a gap. How to contend with the rollickingly recklessness of creatures like us is a talent they have yet to acquire. They look at us ancients in rocker suits, one even more different than the next. Fingers can’t be put on us and we don’t care. Makes us punk rock as much as it makes us metal as much as it makes us gangsta. It’s all just rock n’ roll to me.

Let them be uncomfortable, let them storm the backyard looking for mob justice. We will take these villagers’ torches and smoke their contents like spliffs. We will use their pitchforks as roach clips. They’re just not that brash though, they sit quietly with their good friend’s boyfriend’s friends, who’re my friends as I am the birthday girl’s beau.

She sits in a white dress, black prints of butterflies are scattered in equidistance across her petite frame. Our eyes are instruments of sex, while facial expressions are comically child-like and this balance typifies the union so far.
She’s drunk, but amazingly still standing. I would say tall, but she’s much shorter than me. Looking up into my face, hers scrunches in mock disgust like an overly discerning two year-old and I can’t help but love her all soused on Belgian lagers and blood wine. All other cares are abated and disappear as all the riffraff, hers and mine, leave and we slink in almost a low crawl like puppies into the pitch embrace of early morning.