If I listened to every advertisement
hollering through the static
of my cable-hooked television,
I'd have a mammoth bottle
of Hidden Valley Ranch
sitting with the ego-quenching sheen
of recommendation in my fridge,
a Weight Watchers membership
(it told me to join as soon as possible
with the speed of a steroid-devouring treadmill),
Children's Tylenol
(despite being situationally barren),
and a Bowflex-shaped elephant,
ivory tusks slumping uselessly in the corner.

My living room would be the fraternal twin
of the American Smithsonian,
a faux-genuine quilt
of our Founding Fathers'
present day descendants
draping over my popcorn ceiling.

I return to the latest
sacred cow in the flea store
cartel of Lifetime Movie heroines;
it's "Vengeful Vixens Sunday"
and Elizabeth Berkley shooting men
and stabbing women in the back
all while eating buckets of Ben and Jerry
and getting addicted to crystal ****.

The dialogue is as freshly
packaged and slovenly edible
as the Minute Ready Late Night Dinner
with a cartoon grandma plastered on the logo,
all to remind you of down home,
or in the case of this Lifetime screenplay,
a time when the brain wasn't fully developed.
Same difference.

We all hide our guilty pleasures
as if our tolerance for the
secondhand existence of these favorites
were deemed malignant
by a cardboard kingdom
of young adult sophistication,
but I ask you:
who hasn't slipped into the comfort
of a mind turned to mush?

When a situation has exceeded
its date of expiration
in the weak-***** refrigerator
of your memory,
the noxious smell that looms
from thick barrier to thick barrier
is enough to make your arm hairs
drop like counterfeit pine needles.

It must be, then,
this awkward moment,
or maybe this childhood trauma,
the smell of it,
that has caused this grimace
sealed by the cement of self-castigation
on your incongruously human face each day.

The past is our psychotic ex-boyfriend,
the kinds that breaks the windows
when your eyes have collapsed shut,
when our pretty little souls
were at their most exposed
and our frail little doors
were rocking on their hinges.

Save me from him-
rinse me clean-
help me ripen
and never rot.

Give my senses refuge
from the siege leering
in the Expressionist slabs
of my pitch black Memory.

The Internet, for a good helping
of the American demographic,
is the highest-rated of sanctuaries.

I use "sanctuary"
in a filthy and blatantly pornographic manner,

for every time
we post on our nicotine-scented Facebooks
that we're "so ******* bored" we "could die,"
there's at least one other
hand snaking you along
those fetishes you stash beneath your sleeve
like black silk underwear;

and no matter what you do,
nothing will explain away
those two consecutive Youtube videos:
"Black muscle man in blue thong"
followed spontaneously by
"12 year old boy sings Judy Garland!",
each, to the innocent bystander,
juxtaposed like two opposing ******
in one ****** up candy shop.

The grotesque meat show,
always the same introduction,
always right on time with the
churn churn churning of his
loneliness his rage his silence
onto those sheets
with no regard for the family
and friends of fibers.

It used to be hilarious,
perfect lunch table standup,
but once you learn
that with ***, there might be
signs of love in the decipherable thrusting,
that a plot is swimming helplessly
in the oceanic camouflage of loveless living,
sticky hands can really start to sting.

I am such
a *******
******.

Been fanning the flames
of my flamboyant faggotry
since April 1990
when I strutted from the caverns
of my mother's....
nevermind,
I'm never touching one of those.

My childhood is exemplified
by late-night espionage treks,
sneaking through my sister's side
of our bedroom
maximized by youthful perspective,
each step of mine garnering more
taut gravity than the next,
finally reaching the Holy Grail:
her Barbie collection.

In the fourth grade, I drew
my interpretations of those
beautiful, diamond-infested drag queens
that rained feathers and sequins
upon one drought of an existence,
the adults framing my tolerance
as a ****-stained abomination.

Now people ponder
why I'm so overt
with my gaydom.

Why argue with your
nostalgia-hemmed family friend
over the cultural significance
of the Barbra Streisand Album,
or gladly sit through marathons
of 1980s ****** camp classics?

It's the kid in me.
Something lost for an era
in a washing tub
of middle school torture tactics,
heavy breathing
over hiding something
so natural.

And a few years of that
are **** stifling enough
for this gigantic ******.

Do you find it
boring
to spell out the word
"subconscious"?

Not the way I spell it.

Many step onto the first "S"
as if it were
a ***** rain puddle,
but I'm sufficiently alert
and can see that one must dive
into the word's application,
nimbly rummage through the
annals of its history
before conducting one word
in or against its favor.

Glide downward
through the
rhythmically breathing curves
of the voluptuous prefix,
"sub-",
as you begin
dreaming
further
down
towards the comatose
of the rickety construction
that is your superego,
to the "you"
no one knows about
in clear daylight
(even the mirror).

Minor turbulence
may occur
within the rest,
"-conscious",
just a few jagged rocks
stirred into Cloud Nine
to alter your perceptions
like a face hit by a bus.

This is the meat of your matter,
the acidic ruptures
that only the most cunning
infiltrators
can identify and nudge
with their index fingers
using a painful precision,
the ***** band of undergarments
that always seem to loiter behind
in the town laundromat.

But a jagged rock
is a jagged rock,
never eternally bordering
the outline of the planet,
just lodged within the corners
of your comfort zone,
their presence
a necessary evil
for the times you must steer
through the swarms of cataracts
and endure the exrcuciating agony
of becoming a better human being.

You launch yourself
from your adolescent crutches
like the roots of teeth
erupting from the base of the jaw
and prevent single definition,
hack away the tentacles
of emotional paralysis,
by remembering to mend
the tear between
two polar halves,
"sub
conscious."

Under your false promises,
your Freudian timeline,
your ever-quivering Id...
every single one of you.

The falling stars in this ironic night
make majesties
out of those cubicle-ridden New Yorkers'
routine Tuesday night daydreams,
where they make macabre escape routes
out of every perfectly-placed window
piercing the concrete sentences
that escalate from Ground Zero.

Your law offices,
corporate ******* headquarters,
are all bursting at the seams
with these drones,
the falling stars of the human race,
all composed of 14 different shades
of grayscale;

could've been
should've been
could've been shootin' stars
that year they were promised
lives of upper middle class incomes
and Lexus dealerships
bought to dent their status
on the neighborhood,
but that sparkle's been emaciated
by the truth,
the underwhelming spectacle of realization
accentuated by the clicking
and the clacking of company keyboards,
each little click
gnawing more at their patience
than the next;
the faceless brush strokes
gawk through that window,
their plans less hypothetical
over the calendar years.

"I can hear it calling me
from miles away,"
says Copy #90045280,
"see, they
SPEAK
to me, man,
tell me to transcend
the hurdle of the windowsill
and make my rendezvous
with an asphalt avenue,
to join the other casualties
of this rut-infested nation
in a life with the real stars,
falling and shooting
and jettisoning alike,
throbbing lights through dark sky silk
and into the hearts of even the most
robotic of this catalog culture,
and I frightfully,
excitedly,
must listen."

Melting pots are for racists.
The USA is a salad bowl.

The student lounge features
the veggies at their ripest,
collecting oxygen amongst themselves,
for the corn cannot exist
with the broccoli,
and so on
and so forth.

Don't even mention
fruits
to the potatoes.

And the tomatoes,
they're just weird, man,
don't even know
what they are.

We are all at our most
savory and nutritious,
our youthful wisdom
emanating through our
concrete set of hues.

The chili peppers emanate a color
as red as the blood
of their ancestral martyrdom,
no other color,
just red.

Same for the cucumbers
with hearts so coolly refrigerated,
taking forest green,
taking pastel green
with just a few drops
of ivory-scented beige
tucked neatly behind
walls of bamboo-level peels.

The voices of the onions
thud onto the floor
as if being catapulted
from cumulonimbus peaks,
causing the Iceberg lettuce
to almost drown in its own
dressing.

Lady Liberty,
a series of
produce section fragments
sitting much too sternly
with no regard for sprawling.

In the same bowl, though!