.
I looked
Thru the glass at a trembling lil thing
Beady eyes of a worried gerbil
In a worrisome place

The Petco by my house had
Everything you could have
-almost

Rhino's, Daffodil's
Lynx's, Gecko's & even
Alaskan Klee Kai's

Wrapped up in Saran wrap
Or in little glass cages
With little bobbly water dispensers
And kindly placed dishes
Holding nifty pellets of tasty food
That fits their Specialized Diet Plan

They don't have elephants yet

We'll have to ask the manager to order
some of those

Everyone is a joke
Says the clown

Her mother has lung cancer
Crack a joke
He's crying because I bullied him
Crack a joke
He killed himself a week later
Crack a joke

Hysteria
Loud blowhard laughter
Bulging blood-shot tear-filled eyes
Butterflies eating your intestines-

Serious nothing.
Everyone's always your plaything
You say it's because you're Albanian.
Male.
Because you just-dont-care.
Because we're all stupid.
Hypersensitive.
That's a cop out-

I think,
You're just a clown.

I went hunting with my dad once
Around August or September
I was younger but old enough to remember

Windhowls of the deep forests
Sounded like owls everywhere
Straying from our camper - I didn't dare

It didn't take long
   It was almost too soon
Anticlimactic & too simple to be true

Just planted ontop of the weeds
Just a few feet into the brush
Lay a pile of stuff

Disshevled and unkempt
Motionless and covered in burrs
Save for the sleight of a gust to weave thru its fur

The bones weren't white or polished
The cartoons had misled
It sat there in pieces & browning, instead

Skeletal, like random things tossed together
A velcro roadkill tumbleweed
Dried out and unable to bleed.

My dad told me it was a coyote
   I thought,
There's no way that was a coyote - a coyote?

It's just a pile of stuff

He had a gold tooth
Right in front

I thought;
A hideous feature
Worse though
Was his aroma -
Certain death & ****
& Liquor.

He screeched some babble at me
I didn't understand
And he got angrier.
'What does this ***
Want from me?'

Unlocked my car
I got in
Slammed the door
Lock.

His index finger
Pointing at me as I drove away

Mysterious strangers everywhere
No
Cool kids I don't know to care about
No
People I don't care about
Period

Red solo cup fuckery
A blasted home ;
Can't move without bumping shoulders
Looks like a neon lion den
Pop-dance factory ambience
Reeks of B.O. and beer
I'm embarrassed to be here

Everyone here bought the
I-can-be-anyone lie of the century
I'm embarrassed to be here

Justice is a *****
With claws
Miles and miles and miles
Guillotine jaws
And when she throws the book at you
It's 1000 pounds
With a curse in every clause.

And when those swords
Turn in on you
It's miles and miles of claws
To wring you out
In a razorblade chokehold you won't ever

forget.

We were so different
It was amazing we even bothered with one another

He was solid gold & tailored
A Rothschild's son
Might as well have been -

I was romantic.
Somehow we found love
Like we stumbled into the lost library of Alexandria
"Not supposed to happen"
Read a disclaimer under us

We didn't read it.

But sometimes
One summer is fleeting
One summer is unplanned
And 'we' didn't fit into his / my future
I always forget finales anyway,

But it was real
I swear on my life it was