as o'ergrown with lust
my childish spirit yet
has been naively quick to trust
and slow to feel regret...

Hey friends,
just want you to know as this year ends,
whether you ingest brownies, alcohol or ecstasy,
stay safe, hydrate and create some new history, blissfully.
Get live, just don't drink and drive cuz we still have memories to make.
Consciously enjoy your slice of heaven, for heaven's sake.
Much love to you and the stars above
May you feel peace as clear and symbolic as the emergence of a dove.
Wear a glove if you get frisky,
and if you're strapped for cash drink off-brand whiskey.
May the music vibrate your soul, and the collective energy-field take hold
For you to seize control and own the present.
Let intuition guide you to a place more pleasant.
Even if you're gonna sit at home, sippin' on some beer,
*I hope you enjoy yourself, and have an amazing New Year!

There’s nothing I remember, so I shall invent a life.
It all starts with a dichotomy. Speech, lack of speech.
Logos, preceded by the lack thereof.
A heartbeat, maybe, echoing to form a vowel.
And then a sigh, with inexplicably twisted tongue.
“I”…
I…
I’ll tell you. Raising a finger from my desk.
I’ll tell you how it began. I was in the dark, and decided I had had enough of it.
I flipped on a lamp at my side and began to write.
There weren’t any words yet, but there were symbols for sounds, and that was close enough for now.
I pressed enter, and the message flew to a compatriot.
Or an enemy. This flush dichotomy of forms abounds!
I hold my breath and wait.
Waiting, for a response.
Waiting, to imagine words I’ll never hear.
And the light hums.
I…
What is it, inside that filament
which speaks?
What is every minute morsel of matter telling me about my beginning?
I’m not sure I want to read it, when my phone shakes.
But that’s what that behavior dictates.
A laugh, a cold analysis, a response.
This could go on indefinitely.
I don’t even know where you are in the world.
I’ll never see you.
I think of a more advanced dichotomy, I read about.
It was attributed to Freud.
A baby masters the objective universe through two utterances
in a ball game.
Fort… gone.
Da… there.
For now, these words are silent, but if I were in a crib
You would be the breast I long to devour,
The meaning I would choose to fill my mouth with
Muffled exclamations:
DADADADADADADA!
And I cry. But I don’t know what this all means to you.
Because I haven’t told you with electronic signs.
I’m not sure the word “to cry” carries any meaning.
It just stands in for fear.
Fear of being alone in the world, with the dark,
And no logos.
But I could go on for days reading walls of text on webpages developed by people
who have long since died.
I can summon the likeness of every celebrity onto a screen
rubbing my ***** while I look at them.
I can hear the music—
I CAN HEAR THE MUSIC—
Of all the world, vibrating. Rhythms contracting, like vulvas after birth.
And the silky, black discharge is this emotion in my brain after I think of you.
I created you with my words.
I illuminated my world with the thought of you.
And now I have nothing to say to the creature I created.
I am in horror before you.
Fort, fort, fort, away!
You have left me, without ever being present.
You were here, you were gone, I had no control.
And when I weep, the fear drowns the sun’s luminescence
The clouds hide the sky
The air sculpts my lungs
With emptiness
after words have come out.

Laurie, it's almost Christmas.
That's why so many quietly desperate people
wear old woolen sweaters, fantasizing about being in
on a joke,
just this once.
Your friends are wildly cackling,
you're not dressed like the others.
I prefer my desperation loud, too.
I'm rather skeptical,
however,
of
forty-year-old Lauries wearing lace tops and wedding rings,
with wet words
sloshing from dank tumblers.

Each seeming mispronunciation evokes
excedingly excessive expectations
in the form of imagined saliva beads extruding
between bottom and top lips.
But they aren't mispronunciations, are they.
It seems that, over time, words have come to sound this way,
for us.
And you've done nothing wrong,
But twenty years ago, you wouldn't have any reason
even to speak to me.
It's fascinating to watch
the canopy of aging shield
youth's shallow perspective
from those rapidly fading stars
of disquieting mortality
which fall, bringing with them
forty years of confused burning
into vision.


How many times have you come to a place,
chatted with a stranger,
and gotten them to leave with you,
in your life?
I've never been able to, myself, but it's different when you're a guy.
I struggle with subtlety, but not as much as you.
There's just no room for ambiguity, were I to brace their lower back,
then casually walk by.
I have no doubt this approach has worked for you.
Only, from my perspective, your effort pulls
that growing chin
further from your forehead,
leaving room for misused eye-
contact with me.

Laurie, I know where you are.
You're in on the joke
outside this bar.
You're still in Nebraska,
as far as bodies go, so am I.
"The Good Life!" you slur,
having never left home,
you never want to go.

Laurie.

Laurie.

Laurie!

Please move.
I'm trying to shoot.
You impede my cue,
thrusting between my fingers.
My actions, words create an un-registering ricochet.
Fine, mock me when I miss.
I am not good at this game,
but I don't want to be.
It's not flirting.

If Nebraska IS the good life
it is the good LIFE, for one.
Like Jesus lived once, so do we, in this room.
He would also agree birthdays are meaningless.
Regardless, I can't be with you here,
because I don't know who is living that one good life,
but it isn't you or I.

I didn't ask about your husband,
I'm left to speculate. Assume.
You'll buy your children presents
and give your husband head he's used to.
Isn't that what rings means this time of year,
or is that only what you used to do?
Did he stop eating like you tell him?
Does he take care of you.
You probably think someone like me
would be willing, know exactly how to.
I can see you touching my arm,
I can feel your friends
rubbing me with their eyes.
My thighs recoil with every shot
as people say their goodbyes.
I know you're ready to leave me behind
and take my body's memory with you
to sleep within your head.

I'll miss you, Laurie.
You remind me that there may be one good life in this state.
Or, at least, someone who wants to **** me without knowing my name.
But the closest thing to a good life I can hope for in Nebraska
is to be noticed by a woman
who will help my imagination
think of a place better than here.
Before I reach your age, Laurie,
I want to find her.

Youth's last call yells loud,
and quells years of chased memories.
I know you can't hear it, Laurie,
but those years are over for you and me.
If you keep the thought of me alive at all,
do this kind and silly thing:
give your children gentle kisses
on their heads before they sleep.
Tell them that they have the one good life
the way my mother lied to me.

against the wall, the firing squad ready.
then he got a reprieve.
suppose they had shot Dostoevsky?
before he wrote all that?
I suppose it wouldn't have
mattered
not directly.
there are billions of people who have
never read him and never
will.
but as a young man I know that he
got me through the factories,
past the ******,
lifted me high through the night
and put me down
in a better
place.
even while in the bar
drinking with the other
derelicts,
I was glad they gave Dostoevsky a
reprieve,
it gave me one,
allowed me to look directly at those
rancid faces
in my world,
death pointing its finger,
I held fast,
an immaculate drunk
sharing the stinking dark with
my
brothers.

Nebraska has over 6 million head of cattle
and is perhaps the largest beef producer in the world.
This is strange, juxtaposed to my neighbors
who are Hindus, from India.
On all sides, I am surrounded by young, attractive,
friendly Indians
living in Nebraska,
studying information systems.
I rarely eat beef, but I joke, for them,
this place must be some kind of sacrilege,
or purgatory
where they go before returning home to join the "growing middle class"
we hear so much about.

They have gatherings, food,
language and ways
of maintaining hegemony among their group
while they are here, in my hallway,
and I am alone.
I have no information to manage,
no home to return to.

They gather in my neighbors’ apartment
talking, late into the night
I once made friends with two of them
who, unlike the others, were both atheists
instead of Hindus.
They told me that Hindu women, like the ones next door
do not have *** before marriage,
but the men do.
This seemed like a paradox, but I believe them to this day.
And when I hear this platonic conversation, muffled by the walls
it sounds like pigeons
cooing
flapping their wings in an alleyway
And having nowhere to go.
The countless, devout Hindu men
visiting my charming neighbors
remind me of adolescence
how I used religion as a cover for my shyness
I admired these men, in their pursuit
of something I was told to be obtainable
and then I remembered all the people
who were not devout
******* the religious girls I tried to flirt with
while I was in high school.
I laugh.
I wish there were a high minded reason I stopped believing in the zombie Christ,
but it was the fact that no one from my church was having *** with me, because
of God and all that, but they were having *** with other people.
**** christians, really, you can have them all.

It’s easier to imagine my neighbors as trapped birds
subtly fighting for scraps
without ****** desire
than to imagine them as people like me,
who know what they want but assume it’s out of reach.
The alternative, to know that they are having ***,
and I am not,
is too upsetting.

I want them to sound like cooing birds,
shy and timid and lost,
because that is how I feel.
But, if their voices, distorted by the walls,
sound like pigeons to me,
what must my silence sound like to them?
How do they want me to seem?

Lonely people, quiet people,
sad people, fending for scraps of trash.
That is not them, but it is me.

I realize it is easier to be a Hindu
than an atheist
in Nebraska,
and it doesn't matter what (or if)
you eat
when you're alone.