I don’t know which is more embarrassing:
My hyperbolic self-indulgent misery,
Or the occasional optimism that sometimes follows it.
I wish I were a championed corporate warlord – my menacing hands, I would feed addicts and eat flesh. Then my pumice heart would not fear deathgrip, nor would worry dog me, raggedy limestoned, from mildew nor loneliness nor pathetic such conditions like panic attacks or post-nasal drip.
I would sell death and exhume, and when I wanted I would fuck, and I would fuck and I would kill, and fuck. I would lie awake and raise the dead, I would cast spells into the night because that’s how being a corporate warlord works exactly.
I would sell plague and accrue wealth because I would never feel guilty about the terribleness of my wretched self-loathing. Terrible like brittle bones in the Mojave. Terrible like the teeth in that obese woman I saw in Needles California, her Arizona border, her cans upon cans of monster energy to feed her starving lashing tongue, twitching fingernails, her unquenchable prison for smoke and crystals.
I would be terrible and I would never think of you.
I didn’t when I drove through assfuck Texico, New Mexico, where the boards over the windows of all the shops were as dilapidated as the people scurrying among them, too abused or confused or high to know well enough to abandon. I didn’t when I drove alone in the West Texas night, among the flickering lights of a thousand lifeless blinking windmills, red lights blinking, the turbines buzzing, the snot-bugs bursting and exploding against my windshield like so many lost snot spirits from those cemeteries long forgotten in the darkness.
I didn’t think of you when I walked among Katrina, and her legacy. The abandoned roller coasters were dead giants, the rusted handrails, the broken busted bumper cars were all welcoming as I lurked and didn’t think of you.
When I left the park I could see a dry procession necromancing from the swamp. I saw skeletons clothed in tattered football jerseys, dragging water-stained brass instruments like rusty coppered piping, they lifted these to their placid faces and wheezed yellow notes from their depths. Then I looked down at my hands and saw that I was a skeleton and I walked among them suppressing screams inside my ribcage and we marched.
Still marching, I awoke early and approached a gate feeling it resonate with the hum of skeletons and the iron bars and the plopping raindrops fat like corn oil, there were translucent newts clinging to the bars, their little toes were polyped mushrooms. The rain was ubiquitous. The newts crawled hypnotically in circles, and there was wispyness in the trails of their tails. I felt happy the way a voodoo doll feels happy.
I lived in a wooden room on a shelf where a woman kept me with her knick-knack fetishes. Sometimes she would lift me to her and I would feel her beating heart against my sweat and hair and bone. Her voice was ancient and brittle, and she whispered bestial magic mantras into my ear and I listened transfixed on the utterances of her polyrhythms. Once while she sang, she milked tears from my veins until I was dry and my body was skeleton. She placed the bones of my fingers in her soup, and her fingers locked into mine and my skull fell into her placid bosom and she held me there as I could feel myself conceding. And that was when I thought of you.
I thought of you and I wept. I wept into her. I wept, so far from home I wept and I raged, like a newborn baby abandoned in a hurricane.
Day 1, Temptation and evil are a matter of perspective.
Day 2, My body isn’t mine. It is borrowed.
Day 3, Asceticism and optimism are equally irrational.
Day 4, Be as an early August morning, as in, prepare for heat unyielding.
Day 5, The sun doesn’t care when we starve.
Day 6, In all probability, God is very lonely.
Day 7, The eagle’s nest at the top of the mountain is littered with black feathers.
Day 8, Climb anyway.
Day 9, Always steal fire.
Day 10, Fasting contributes nothing to feelings of emptiness. Emptiness is a symptom.
Day 11, Death is simultaneously universal and alone.
Day 12, For better or worse, we can only do it together.
Day 13, Muslims have been kinder to me than Christians, but you should never keep score.
Day 14, “Why” is a superfluous question, America will never understand abstinence from food.
Day 15, Moreover, America owns guns.
Day 16, In the future, clean water will not be defecated in. However, feces will be everywhere.
Day 17, There should be sanctity in cleaning feces.
Day 18, God’s forgiveness could possibly be God’s apathy.
Day 19, Remember to forgive yourself just in case.
Day 20, Women and men are separate only in that life kills them differently.
Day 21, Love is a fast burning star, and it is fickle.
Day 22, When shooting for the moon, remember Aesop’s astronomer, and watch the moon escape.
Day 23, In melancholy, we call it passing. In joy, we call it fleeting.
Day 24, Never take joy for granted.
Day 25, Kindness is the best way to stick it to God.
Day 26, As Dad said, the best revenge is living happily.
Day 27, You’ll be surprised how the closest people might want revenge.
Day 28, On an empty stomach, the heart sinks just as fast.
Day 29, Everyone will tell you the first three days are the hardest. They are half right.
Day 30, Ironically, you might not feel like eating when it’s over.
The FBI is located in West Virginia and I find this hilarious. My friends today include ex-junkies and sexist white privilege east coast fuckers, but I can never spell the “privilege of exercise” without the aid of a word processor. The French woman on a roller coaster asked me to translate my feelings on a word processor. I wrote her a bouquet of roses and expected it to be Mother’s Day. There were never any reservations. The dead girl in the yard tried to bite off my ear, but couldn’t because my hair is fucking gorgeous.
These new Chinese guitars are awfully delightful. Sitka and rosewood, ugly but boy oh boy do they resonate; the exercise is physically demanding, but it feels good. I wrote a letter to William Golding and told him a joke. The setup had something to do with Ray Bradbury dying, and the ending was something about everybody everywhere being wretched and horny. I say out loud to the wall that maybe the beast is in us, and I click to download the PDF of Fahrenheit 451(which google reminds me that I’ve misspelled “fahrenheit”) and wonder how they’ll figure out how to burn this one.
When I go backward in time
I find it impossible to explain to my
Eight-year-old self that when you love someone
You stick your tongue inside
Her or him.
“It’s great,” I tell my eight-year-old self.
“You’ll love it when you do it.”
“It just takes some getting used to.”
“It’s like beer.”
He never believes me.
At eight years old he produces no oxytosin.
Which means he basically
Tortures those
Poor cockatiels.
“These
Are my toys!” he boasts and he thrusts
Power
Rangers toward their cages and they
Fluster and they squawk.
And they scatter about newspaper clippings and feathers.
At eleven years old I produced only serotonin
And often
Wondered embarrassed if Mom or Dad knew that I loved
Sarah Wilkinson, or Heather
Emmons, or Kim Tran but
Not yet knowing
That I wanted to stick my tongue inside
Of them. I just clung
To a pillow and dreamt
Stickily.
Later as a teenager it was Nikki
Who loved me very much,
Or at least wanted to stick her tongue inside
Me very much.
And when she did after I beckoned her over
Like a bad-
Ass after us both eating
Chili with extra onions from Wendy’s
Did I taste
What her love tasted like.
Now as I write this
And I remember that I would later
Hurt her
Feelings somehow and now feel guilty and then we both grow
On to stick our tongues inside
Of other people because of love,
I wonder bitterly what my love might
Taste like today,
After having grown
Up into my such present day
Irresponsible
Flibbertigibbet.
Because once upon a time,
I tasted like chili with extra onions
From Wendy’s
And even then
I was good enough for love
To stick her fickle, fickle tongue
Inside of
Me.
Aether blooms dissipate upon exposure;
We knew when we awoke one morning to find
You were overrun with weeds.
For Guillermo after hearing you had died:
God foolishly planted you into the earth,
May you branch forever upwards into the empyrean.
The Swiss must laugh in trochees,
And giggle in avalanches.
The rape scene makes them giggle;
The boy puts all his weight into his thrusting stick.
Is this going to be on the test?
I have an iron core.
I know because I am
Overtly ultra-wound,
And I make sounds.
I am nickel plated
And copper insulated,
My blood is gold.
I fly
And I revolve
And I revolt.
I grow so tired of cathexis. The way it drops you off in the middle of a storm; let the worms be worms. I walk with cathexis like I walk with an imaginary tumor, on a fish hook. Somewhere there’s an echo in an open field of yellow-gilded grain, and an aromatic breeze, but no source. I walk with cathexis the way I walk with friends who are no longer the same, or who owe me money. Cathexis tells the same tiresome jokes and somewhere there are people laughing and cathexis always takes it personally. When I see cathexis I see a toxic cell phone with a missed-call log a million entries long. Cathexis is a song for an irritating radio commercial that irrationally appeals to the universe. Cathexis is with me while I wash a thousand dirty dishes by hand. My hands wrinkle, Cathexis reminds me over my shoulder, it whispers, “You missed a spot,” and, “You need to buy more soap.” Cathexis reminds me, “You’re a fool, you’re a louse, you’re a dope.” I say, out, go, and through. Cathexis says “Clouds, flat tires, and guilt.” I grow so tired of Cathexis – when I grunt in effort, it makes me the third wheel of the cosmos; my soul is not incorporeal, but silt.
When I’m Euphoric
I feel that I cannot die. I lie.
The black bag folds on itself and startling.
I once dream where I pull out my teeth as they crunch
My jaws are tense and tongue knows there will be no dissolving.
I gather them in my hand. I want to hand them to the First Lady, her pink
Palms, open and ready, they contrast sharply with her immortal blue dress. I want to
Stand at an abyss and throw an electric pink frisbee into the blackness. I don’t really
Care where it goes, just to see it fly perfect and perpendicular and sigh and sigh.
I think of legs, I undress. I pull my legs out one leg at a time. The
Sun is mine. The jacarandas bloom. When I come down, I can
Hear a celebration far behind me. The guests are laughing as happy
They wait to surprise me, their voices grow fainter, I see
In my review mirror, the lights getting smaller until
Flicker. But. I drive and I drive into the black.
alecvenida 