Whose thoughts am I thinking?
Is this is a community of people
Supporting each other’s work?
Is this a community of people
Making fun of each others work
Enabling each other’s drinking
And hanging out?
When you get old
You’re supposed to need reading glasses
But I read good
Instead I suddenly need distance glasses
My doctor said that’s fucked
But they did a bunch of tests
And I’m fine
I shopped for glasses alone
And I had to do the glasses dance
Alone
I need need
I need to go go to get my my my
Glasses glasses
Before you go go
Do you like these on me?
My new new my glasses glasses
They work they work for me
They work they work for me
You know when someone is
Constructing a new persona for you
To justify their treatment of you,
Like Dexter hoping you’re a pedo
So he can murder you
And release an awful pressure?
I’m doing my best to be a saint to this person
Even though I’d like to tell him
What an objectionable sack of shit he is,
Because fuck if I’m giving that
Ugly motherfucker a reason.
He’ll have to be a shithead party of 1.
When Jesus said
Turn the other cheek
I like to imagine that
Was his reasoning/interior monologue
But anyway, I like The Bible and Dexter
For the same reason:
I enjoy procedural shows unfocused on a series arc.
Pooping and reading
National geographic
For 3 damn hours
My oven starting making insane noises out of nowhere
I told the coop board
They immediately unplugged it, disconnected the gas
A week later a delivery date was scheduled for a new oven
I had to reschedule a scout for a shoot
I could have asked someone to be in my apartment
But I’m weird about people being in my space when I’m not there
I know when I die, someone will need to be in here
Even though I won’t care when I’m dead
I care now, so I’ve been meaning to death clean my living space
This means I need to get rid of everything embarrassing
But I’m not exactly sure what it is that I don’t want people to find
I don’t even have any freak shit, like a sex swing
It’s weird to me when I go home with someone I barely know
They leave me sleeping while they go to work
Like they trust me not to spy or steal or try on their baseball uniform
Or maybe they don’t care
I once lent a man a book and when he gave it back to me
He commented on things I underlined and notated
I was so embarrassed that I pretended as though
Someone else may have written those things in the margins
Even though it was obviously my penmanship
Watching him watch me get flustered and lie
Was even more embarrassing
Now when I lend people books, I flip through first
To confirm there’s no trace of my existence
And there’s no fucking way
I’m letting anyone in here for the oven delivery window
I know some people
Can be loathsome hypocrites
But you cannot be
…
In this bitch stressing
On the moral grandstanding
Of your frenemies
I recently learned the term “Pick Me Girl”
And if you don’t know what that is, get on TikTok
At first it was nice to see this concept
In recognized Internet vernacular
But then I found it insufficiently descriptive
In the same way that it’s not super helpful
To blanket-categorize the motivations of
Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy…
Where do I even start?
How about the cis-gendered straight woman
Weirdly interested in discussing other women’s boobs, etc
She’ll say her favorite movie is “Don’s Plum”
She’s giving high school incel/loser
Who recently assumed some low level social cachet
But is still over eager to have friends, let alone male friends
Let’s call her New Money of Clout
There’s always a beta woman who looks up to her
Docile and slow, a gentle cow who loves to be herded
She’ll blow you off for NMoC
But she doesn’t mean to hurt your feelings
She’s so embarrassed about her priorities
That she hasn’t yet admitted them to herself
She’s likable and tragic
Let’s call her Uncle Tom of Women
There’s Ms. “I just don’t have female friends” …
Ms. “Feminists are whiny losers”...
The “do-gooder” who tries to fix you up
With her insufferable male friend…
The “sympathetic ear” who’s there
To commiserate about your “crazy” ass
With the insufferable male friend
For not fucking him…
Or for fucking him and then pointing out some obvious bullshit…
There’s Karla Homolka…
There’s the Louisiana school teacher
Who puts her husband’s jizz
In students’ cupcakes…
I don’t think we need a word for her
My writing partner won’t drink coffee at my house
Because it’s disgusting
It’s really not that disgusting
I just make it a little weird
One day I ran out of coffee and I said
You know what? I’ll quit
But I’d walk by the coffee shop
Soon I was spending $10 everyday on fancy coffee
I became friends with all the baristas
I’m codependent, so I make new friends wherever I go
One barista told me he was launching a poetry chapbook
I felt pressured to go for no reason
When I got to the chapbook launch I was uncomfortable
No one talked to me
I drank some orange wine, even though I don’t drink anymore
I knew I’d made a grave mistake
I could tell they were all thinking
Yeah I told her about it, but I didn’t think she would actually show up
I thought it would be weirder if I suddenly left
I wondered why I even tried to quit drinking coffee in the first place
Maybe it was because I felt judged by this one cheap asshole I was seeing
For spending $7 at Blue Bottle, but I should have been like
Motherfucker you should see the money I’ve wasted on yayo
My chevy bangin hey-o
I went home and researched espresso machines
My addiction had progressed, so I couldn’t go back to my old machine
I got the Delunghi Specialista
It’s whatever
You know in “Half Baked” when Bob Saget incredulously aks Dave Chapelle
Have you ever sucked some dick for marajuana?
Well under the right circumstances I might suck dick for some decent espresso
But I’m grateful to be privileged enough that I’ll never be confronted by that situation
“Took Her to the O” is so catchy that it took me 5 years to stop and wonder why King Von’s date is down for this excursion, like, “Oh cool. O’Block sounds romantic,” especially when Von’s being such a lame dick. It’s possible Von is an unreliable narrator, and he was really talking like a simp to her IRL at the store and in the car, then acting all hard for the audience. But maybe it really did go down like he said and his date has codependency issues. This is a list poem of bad ideas for dates I’ve been invited on by various men who probably dislike me as much as Von seems to dislike his love interest:
Pick up package at FedEx warehouse
Watch him play pool
Double date with Jeffrey Epstein
Double date with his dad, who talked about being a date rapist
Double date with a woman he was cheating on me with
Watch him shoplift a shrimp platter at Gristedes and eat it in the park
Tour temples featured in “Tomb Raider”
Some kind of bike expo at Javits Convention Center
Hike (ugh)
Assist him on a shoot
Medieval Times with his entire family
Scuba diving (the mf knew this was my one fear)
Burp Castle (lol wtf)
The night was black, monotonous heat
No planets, no stars
He bandaged the bite
Unblinking, impassive
Undoubtedly getting off on the idea
That it added to his lore
And by lore I mean inflated ramblings
Exchanged laterally between aging frat boys
Imagine how meaningless my life is
That I’m writing a poem about it
My feeling was, “This will be comical,”
But I also knew him decades ago
Unacquainted with disappointment
With the dispassion and fake self deprecation
Of an older, more dishonest hypocrite
I couldn’t have imagined I would feel so sad
Watching him sink so low
All of this the kind of prelude to a fall
To find meaning in later
So you can feel psychic, observant, whatever…
They say when a dog turns
You see it in the eyes
When a person turns
It’s more like you’re debating
The metastasization of a tumor
Until arriving at a status of belief
In the cancer’s reality
Then prior moments stand out big and tragic
In a linear regression
Toward a vanishing point of disgust