Willie Smith

Lobotomy Lullaby

Socks everywhere inside out, jockstraps cockeyed on lampshades. Cockroaches investigating dead soldiers. Magazines facedown on the throwrug, half-done cigarettes extinct behind skeletal ash, senile eggshells, geriatric coffee cups. Grease stuck the air. The cheap tv scratching, spitting, rolling, barking. 

“This place is a fucking garbage dump!” the landlady yelled that one time she looked in. 

I didn’t care. SSI paid the rent. I was crazy. I could do anything in there – just so it didn’t take money and I wasn’t too obvious about having a good time.

So I jacked off and spent a lot of time on the crapper turning the sports page, lighting cigarettes one off the other, wallowing in tobacco-shit vapors. One morning, though, I got so bored I jumped off the can. Headed for the door. Snatched on the way a jockstrap off a lamp. Sauntered out into the hall, to be greeted by my landlady, who shrieked, why were my pants off!

I screamed she was lucky not-seeing what she was, killed her with a steak knife; bounded down the hall squealing hogcalls, feeling the air feeling my balls.

So now I am bored in a new room with beds on the ceiling and the walls and the floor. They fill me full of pills that make everything peaceful. Tomorrow they remove my head. They tell me I won’t care, although helpless bowels might occur, and smoking won’t anymore seem.