Poetry Boys

They know they’ll reel you in with those carefully spun words,
Words that read like music and make you swoon.
Words they use to build themselves up in their own minds
So they can carelessly compare themselves
to all that they’ve romanticized.
Bukowski.
Kerouac.
Burroughs.
Ginsberg.
Go ahead and fancy yourselves a “new beat generation.”
String those words together as well as you can manage,
At least they’re pretty on a printed page.

They’ll make you blush.
Those smiles, that spark in their eyes,
They wear their costume – dark demented soul – so well
That you’ll fall for how they fall for you,
How they just can’t live without you,
They’re in love and they know it.
You’ll fall for how they watch you
Because you’ve never noticed a red flag in your life.
Animal-like. Almost primal.

They’ll play up their sob stories
Because it’s so much easier to play a victim or a martyr,
To tell you how unfair their lives have been
Then it is to tell you that they’re fucked up.
They’ll cry about how things didn’t turn out.
The dreams they never chased, never really worked for,
Surprise. Those didn’t pan out either.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
A few reworded quotes, a couple of lines
Read just the right way, in just the right voice.
Their picture, their video masked with just the right filter.
Deep. Tortured. Begging.
Please, please choke on this regurgitated shit.

There are men who write poetry who aren’t
Whiny, unevolved, poor little poetry boys,
But those men are poets,
Not boys who slide into your messages with:

“I’m drunk.”

“I’m horny.”

“My wife/girlfriend
Doesn’t love me anymore.”

“I’m sad so I can go behind her back,
But she belongs to me.”

“Sure, I’m messaging some cute young thing,
But that bitch finally found happiness
In a real man’s arms instead of
Worshipping and appreciating the ego that is me.”

Poetry boys spin their words with their pens,
Their typewriters – if we’re going to get real hipster about it –
Because real words, substance, gets stuck in their throats,
And they haven’t faced themselves in the mirror
In god knows how long.
They want you weak at the knees with your legs and heart open,
So they smile those smiles, wink those winks.

“Let me fill you up so I can fill up all the parts of me
That I haven’t already drowned out with booze.”
Because all the real artists are alcoholics, right?

Money Shots

Natural Enemy

Disturbing the Universe

One summer, I painted
the Desiderata on the walls
of a deserted Civil War mansion.
My best friend was visiting
from California. We swam in the pool
and played tennis at the edge of town.
At night I stole furtive glimpses
of her long body, dark hair
piled on top of her head
and carefully secured with bobby pins.
She slept in a folding cot
at the edge of my mattress,
rolling and tossing in the Illinois heat.
We talked feverishly about our virginity–
how we might lose it, and to whom.
She was convinced I’d surrender mine first.

We nabbed containers of powdered paints
from my mother’s kitchen cupboard,
carried warm water in jugs for blocks,
laughing at our cleverness.
The building’s crumbling walls
were defaced with coy obscenities:
“Meet me here at 10 PM.
Wear cut-offs and nothing else.
Blow me.” Carefully, I painted
red and green and brilliant blue
over scrawled pictures of erect penises,
copied words from the sacred text
about disenchanted love, perennial as grass,
and decorated the gaping edges of holes
with flowering vines and sunrises.

My best friend’s artwork
was always more fluid than mine,
her hands steady while she dabbed
a tiny paintbrush on dirty plaster.
As vivid color stretched across the walls,
more girls paraded to the mansion,
carrying brushes, markers and glitter.
Each of us either copied a line
from the text or devised our own quotes.
I branched out to TS Eliot verses,
since I had painstakingly memorized
“The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”
several weeks beforehand.
The aged building overflowed with words.

A reporter from the small-town paper
photographed our artwork,
somehow capturing its brightness,
even in black and white.
She took pictures of my friend and me
standing in front of our paintings,
both of us looking solemn and deep.
She asked why we were determined
to decorate a decaying house
that had stood abandoned for years.
We wanted to transform ugliness
into beauty, bring dignity back
to the majestic structure.
She nodded at us sagely,
though she didn’t really understand,
and wrote a nice puff piece
that ran two weeks later.
By then, my friend had returned to California.

Two days after the story broke,
I eagerly climbed the broken stairs
to the mansion’s second floor,
but our paintings had been destroyed.
Someone had smashed holes
in the flowers and sunrises,
and written obscenities next to the quotes.
It took great determination
to destroy the work
we had spent so many days creating.
That person needed to bring
a combination of rocks and hammers
to the top of a collapsing staircase
and attack a wall repeatedly.

The colors made him furious.
My friend sighed when I told her,
and said, “Well, that’s just how
people are, I guess.” It was easy
for her to be philosophical, since
she was two thousand miles away
and couldn’t see the destruction.
She was always more lucky than I.

Free-Range Teens

I worried about promiscuity
when I was seventeen,
and its alignment
with moral character.
I felt certain
I had sacrificed
my own values
without much resistance,
and I feared this
would go on
a permanent record
that would reflect badly
on me, later.

In secret locations,
I furtively opened
medical pamphlets,
library books,
and paperbacks I’d bought
at yard sales.
I read everything I could
about penises and vaginas,
eagerly devoured details
about their angles
and dimensions.
I gorged myself
with gaudy images,
but felt sick afterward,
as if I’d eaten
too many hamburgers.

My boyfriend and I
had an elaborate ritual
that summer-
I spread out my body
on his basement couch
like a cheap buffet.
While my head
nestled in his lap,
my boyfriend probed
the inside of my vagina
one furtive digit at a time,
until he was finally able
to place his entire hand
inside me, at least as far
as his knuckles.

His parents
never came downstairs,
and never asked
what we were doing:
it was 1970s America,
and they couldn’t
have been less interested.
We ate hot dogs
in bright red baskets
at the drive-in afterward,
and my boyfriend
talked about planets
and where he was going
to college in the fall.

None of my
moral pronouncements
made a goddamn
bit of difference,
because our parents
and geography
would shove us
so far apart that
we would never find
each other again.

Milkshakes and sex
were all we had
at the moment-
the viscous sweetness
of cream,
and rapid metabolisms
that would make it
much easier
to forget everything.

Hangover Shits

new girl

i get down on my hands and knees
and start licking her
then sucking on her clit
she moans
and grabs my hair
and says yeah
and i keep sucking
and it feels like her clit is growing
it’s like an inch long now
and i’m sucking
and she’s pulling my hair
and pushing me into her and thrusting
and it’s 2 inches and getting real stiff
now it’s 3 inches
what the fuck is going on
it’s like 4 inches now
and i’m gagging
and she’s saying fuck yeah bitch
fuck yeah
and she’s saying
i’m about to cum
and i’m choking
and she’s saying
almost there don’t stop
and then i can feel it warm
shooting down my throat
and i open my eyes
and i’m crying and spitting and gasping
and she’s saying
yeah bitch
and i’m like what the fuck was that
and she says
what?
and i say
are you a dude?
and she says
yeah

In Our 20’s, A Drunken Early Evening

Things She Said to Him

‘You take the good with the bad.’
‘You’re a good person and a wicked artist.’
‘You’re very sensitive.’
‘I find you intriguing.’
‘You’re a strong person.’
‘I like your penis.’
‘You’re not too crusty for an old guy.’
‘You’re funny.’
‘You’re one sexy mother.’
‘You make my day.’
‘My kids like you.’

All these thoughts
crossed his mind
as she came screaming
towards him with
a butcher knife.

Stepdad