after Ohran Pamuk

Everything just rushes by  me now.
There are no longer the ritual pauses:
when I held a cigarette between *******,
I could hold Time itself.

I could pluck two stills
from the hurried film of my day –
one of what had just happened,
and the other of what might come next –

and I could stand, quietly alone
between those two frames,
holding time still in my hand,
and just look, and think, and smoke.

She hates the children because they are not her own.
Her smile forced, her hands crooked with some secret defeat,
and the children pay for it.
From the back of the classroom, she looks beautiful,
but it is an illusion.
She has a mane of red hair framing her face like a lion’s mane.
But that is the most remarkable thing about her.
She is gaunt. She is very tall. She is unmistakable.

She is awkward when she relaxes. She fidgets and trembles.

In the playground, she has Yard Duty.
She resents the students in grades 2, 3, 4, …
because they have outgrown her, they no longer need her.
She must be in her thirties, you can tell by her hands.
And there is no ring there.
That might be the thing. There is no ring.

Her bed sheets are white.
She curls her long body up into a ball at night.
She works hard. She can’t help herself.
Yet she knows there is no reason to admire people
for working hard if they can’t do otherwise.

She’s absent from school today.
She is never absent.
The words that blow through the air in the playground
and hallways are: She is getting married today.
She decided to get married today.

She already hates her husband, though she hardly knows him.
She hates him because a person, a man,
needs to be attached to the ring that she wears
and the baby she will have. And why should there be?

He calls her name from the other side of the bed.
She curls herself up into a ball.
Perhaps she will hate her baby, too.
She might not be able to help it.
But can you blame someone for feeling
something she can’t help but feel?

i was delighted
when i first heard
michael jackson had died

men who sleep with little boys
and spend copious amounts of time
with them are always pedophiles

that is generally how it works,
but only all the time

soon after, people were posting
about this great loss
on a website i used to post at
they were sad that the *******
was dead

i always thought it was stupid
how he named himself the king of pop
that was a title he gave himself
and pretty much everyone went along with it
even the parents of the little boys he molested

i told the people who were grieving the loss
of the king of *******
that when a man molests a child,
it cancels out everything else
he does in life,
but no one listened, they just got ******* at me
because albums like thriller
are more important than protecting children from abuse

then i told them that "people" who abuse children
are unfit for human life
they told me i was a sociopath
then turned  the conversation
back to how much they all loved thriller
and pepsi commercials

jeff bezos had the tip jars removed
from the amazon cafeteria
because an (overpaid) amazon executive
was told by the cafeteria workers he couldn't use the change
in the tip jar to pay for his order
(after he tried to pay with change from the tip jar)

he then complained to jeff
and jeff decided that the cafeteria workers
who make minimum wage shouldn't have a tip jar
if the tips weren't going to be used to pay
for rich amazon executives lunches

so the next time you place an order with amazon
because you love price fixed counterfeit merchandise so much
go out and apologize to every child and middle class
person that you are personally responsible for displacing
because you owe them a huge ******* apology.

elane liked *******
and quite possibly ******
and what ever they called ****
in the late 70's/early 80's

she had a daughter named franny
who i played with
and a husband named glen
who she cheated on when he was out
milking the cows

all the milkers smoked cigarettes
and lived in mobile homes down the hill
from us

except for max who went to church with us
my dad offered him a job while he was in jail
i think he turned himself in for some crime
when he got saved

my dad always liked to hire ex-convicts
because he was a firm believer in grace and mercy
and second chances

anyways, once franny and i got into a fight
about our dads
she said her dad was the boss,
which was confusing to me because
i thought my dad was the boss
we both got mad and cried

i used to pick up the cigarette butts
that the milkers had left in some dried out mud puddle
(i was five or younger so give me a break)
and pretend i was smoking

since my parents were united pentacostal
i was taught all about the glorious
tribulations and persecutions that i would have to live
through before jesus raptured us all to heaven

before i was old enough to be terrified
i pictured myself as being left behind
smoking cigarettes, hiding out in trees
kind of looking forward to it

whenever i would go over to franny's place
we would watch cartoons. ****** doo was my favorite
my parents didn't have a tv, so franny's was where it was
at for me.

elane would come out of her bedroom and yell at
franny to turn the tv down because she was trying to sleep

franny was always telling me how her mommy
had an owie in her nose

later on, glen quit
and moved away with franny and elane

and the mobile home they had lived in
burnt down

i used to post poetry and short stories
and long, meandering journals
written while ******
on another website,

but quit because membership has gone down
from several thousand to four members over the years.

the same few people log in every day,
they are all retired, so they have a lot of spare time.

the kids aren't coming back, and everyone just keeps on getting
older and older.

one of these four people has been a member there since 1999,
so almost a generation.

he has 3,852 works on file.
basically, he is the only person
still posting on that website.

many of these were written in the 70's, 80's, 90's,
but are posted daily in comic sans font, along with a comment
and the date the poem was originally written. he keeps archives.

i hope he doesn't read the poetry here because i don't want to hurt his feelings.
he has the same birthday as my dad,
so i sort of felt sorry for him when his girlfriend who listed her occupation as "professional clown, potter, and jazz flutist" started ignoring him and left him and the website that he has loved for 18 years.

she has 999 works on file
and all of them are really long and typed in all capital letters. most of them have no paragraph breaks.