Cowboys Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Mamas
When I die I will ask who, who robbed the register. My first question will go unanswered. My second question, a refrain I hope rots the core of another prayer, the moment I learned that one could, if one wanted, laugh a priest into shame, that opened it all up . . . and then it passes. Another chapter in the Universal Bible of Human Misery. It sold thousands of copies the first year. Brilliant reviews, but almost nobody read it. You can find it in any used bookstore. $2.95. Mass-market paperback. Heavily underlined. Marginalia.
No Frontsies, No Backsies
I am Walter Mercado's tailor and my ass is made of gold. Come sniff at its horizon! At the top of the hour! At the bottom as well! Spank me with a hammer! My ass is a bell! The parishioners come a-running, clad in trash bags. The poor bastards worship the grandeur of my work. The poor bastards worship the poop on my stoop. What do I charge? What do I charge to let you scoop up my poop? I charge nothing because you may not scoop it. You may not. I will. I will use my solid gold shovel, and you will watch and, by watching, pay for it.
Does Marcellus Wallace look like a bitch?
However, we come quite to the precipice, quite the messy mess. Victorian. Where in the milk's the milky loquaciousness I bet my mother's milk on? That shit is gone. My sole inheritance this advice: Beware black rats and white mice. Beware brownstones with bay windows: traps. Carnivorous plants. Asps and asspacks full of candy. Rush on the radio huddling masses, fingers the hungers I can't let you go.
Correspondence
I type poet in an email and google tries to sell me poet lessons. They are taking all my letters. And they read them. Spool them round some headquarters. Parking meters, I wrote my uncle last, are a product of your generation. Parking meters, he wrote back, what are those? He wrote those words on paper. Sent them through the mail. My next letter began: Dear Uncle Luddite, okay I have thought about it and I will join your paper airplane factory under one condition: no contracts. And you can't fire me. Dear Spacebook, it is 2:50pm. I own the shirt on my back. Dear Myface, fucked til seven and I've got 1800 friends so why are my hands shaking. I should know better.
