First Night Without Jack
Drought, with running water
Everything right
About this world was
Tethered inside you
How am I supposed to not be morbid now?
It looks like I picked the wrong day to stop missing things
So long, my generous-guru friend
Adios, Bird King
Death is a real dick, at all times
It gets hung up on its own girth and doesn’t
Connect its acts with what it’s doing
Kick it in the nuts for me, brother, sing us one more tune
for Jack Collom
A Year Without Prince: Part 1
A year?
Sexy-seriously?
(stomp down on that delay pedal)
How has it already been a year?
(year year year)
Where the fuck
has everything gone?
(oh, right)
(you keep it in there)
(as long as the water’s warm enough/that’s hot)
Thirsty?
Our whole world’s been swallowed by ego
like it was sloppy joe sauce
or left over wine
(what’s this button do?)
(It’s either wired to take down the EPA
or inform the staff that President Parched Asshole
wants another Coke)
Things that have pride besides doves:
Fascists, fast cars, furiously bald actors,
Bon Jovi, bulldozers, heavy sleepers,
trampolines, outrageous synth solos,
winery-s and sandpaper
politicians and the occasional parade
stiff dinner rolls
and hard doom
(fast guitar solo)
(outsourced belly dance moment)
(We should continue this conversation over thongs)
How many days are there in a year again?!
(primordial scream)
I don’t know
52 seconds and our pants are still on?
(proud keyboard fart)
(Easy baby, that thing’s my weiner
not an ice pick)
(whisper) (Better like that
or not better like that?)
Things that are never satisfied
besides Prince’s mom:
Vampires and jazz licks
truth’s vibrator and pure love
John Mayer’s girlfriends
and overly planned picnics
natural disasters
and tone deaf billionaires
in a park
Wake up wide eyes!
(got ta got ta got ta)
Harry Styles is a pubic hair trend
not a pop star!
Lake Minnetonka isn’t a lake
it’s a goddamn state of mind!
Legend has it there was this one night
when Prince danced so hard
the universe cried dead light
and Prince pissed mozzarella and black olives
until the lady he’d hung his heart on screamed
Great!
Thanks!
Now I want Pizza!
and Prince was like, “Troy, I don’t serve ribs”
and Troy said “I’m not Troy, darling. I’m Prompelunia
and I said pizza big shot, not ribs”
And Prince was all, “Sorry. I thought
you were kinda quoting one of my albums. Shit, yeah
(bang down hard on the sus2 chord)
We should get pizza
So they did
A Year Without Prince
(this thing in 4 parts, prefaced by brief rambling
followed by a quick prologue and then…….zoom!)
Wendy?
Yes Lisa?
I’m not Lisa. I’m Dennis
Oh, sorry Dennis. I’m not Wendy anyway. I’m also Dennis too.
Huh.
(Purple silence. Followed by dialogue)
That doesn’t mean we can’t still wear ripped t-shirts together and save the world.
Cool.
Prologue:
vagina katana
half price cheeseburgers
dogs barking like abandoned flare guns
smoking outside another long-day-embedded-
shitty-kung-fu ashtray-sky
sort of night
(to be continued!)
A Month Without Nickel
Sleep is an old vacuum cleaner from the 1950’s
The kind they used to sell door to door
Most now buried and the ones still around
Don’t really work anymore
And when I do sleep
The dreams eat all the floors
Until I wake up perpetually exhausted again
With no safe place left to stand
I miss everything about her
Even the things that used to piss me off
I miss her reverse Hitler mustache
And the way she’d leave old action figure twist ties
And other random shit like ham in the middle of my futon
For me to find when I returned home from work on the weekdays
I miss the way she used to follow me everywhere
When I was in a bad mood and she’s slap her paw
Against me face every time my face needed slapping
In that way she had
That seemed to say
Hey, we’re alive
Life is hard
But we’ve got each other
Cat logic goddamn it
We’re gonna be ok
I don’t have that anymore
I’ve lost my best friend
And that reassurance that came
With the two of us simply
Being together in the same room
I miss the way she’d crawl beneath the blankets
On the long nights when my mind was surrounded
By all the beautiful things that have left me
I miss the way she’d chase me up the stairs
And I miss the way she’d manage to break into the basement
And I miss the way she’d scream for cat treats
At the top of her lungs when she was breathing
Nickel,
I miss you so much
That I have a hard time believing that you’re gone
And fuck I’m so sorry
I took you for granted
When I took you that way
Like we tend to take
All the things that keep us going
For granted
You’re buried in the back yard now
And I’m whatever I am
And I am now also the backyard
You’re buried in me
And I will carry you until
Until my legs turn to dust
And then I’ll carry you some more
Because fuck it
Death cannot stop us
Because I refuse to let it
And I know
Wherever you are
That you refuse to let it
To stop you too
And p.s. also
Shutter Island also misses you madly
And says: hello
Assignment: Erotic Chores*
Digging A Grave For My Cat
There is nothing erotic about digging a grave. It’s sexier than that new 50 Shades of Grey movie, obviously. But everything’s erotic when compared to something like that.
When digging a grave there is nothing erotic for the one doing the digging. For the digger this grave business is an erotic-less chore. There’s nothing sexy about dying. And still there is death. Everywhere. At all times. Why is that? Judging by the catcalls of a perpetual oblivion, something has to be getting off. Right?
I don’t know.
Maybe the ground gets off on it. The shovel entering tip first and all that. Each thrust propelled by the grief of the digger. Each thrust thrusting deeper as the hole widens and the tears flow. Is that a cockroach or a clitoris?! Wind-blown-into-the-yard candy bar wrapper or cum rag (or both)?!
Fuck off! My cat is dead!
Maybe for the ground this is erotic. Maybe the ground gets off on this shit. Something has to be getting off on all this death, but I’m not! I may have been getting the ground off, but that’s not what I was there for. My best friend had just left me. I wasn’t out there to fuck the earth like a grieving porn star. I was out there to bury my cat. I’d woke up earlier that morning and Nickel was gone, laying dead beside my feet. Her eyes staring off into something that couldn’t save her. Staring straight through me.
Wrapped her in a blanket and put her in the basement Norman Bates style, plan being to bury her when I got home that evening, and I went to work, crying the whole way there, crying through my first appointment of the morning, and crying as I canceled everything else I’d had scheduled for the rest of the day until it was 9:30 in the morning/I headed home
like Death’s call girl or a damn sex object for the cold Earth but fuck that! The world is full of horrible things that ejaculate! Nothing I could do about that. I had a cat to bury! Anything I caught taking sexual pleasure while I did this would be properly eye-balled and logged. Bury the cat first. Seek and obtain revenge on those sick fuckers after.
I needed a shovel, I realized.
Earth dildo! The dirt screamed
Shut up!
I didn’t have one anymore so I dove inside the first shovel store that I came across. I did not leave the store immediately. I walked around for awhile with the shovel held back over my shoulder with n eviscerating glare I my eyes picking fights with anything that looked as if it was finding any part of this sexy: half a rack of spare tires the glue guns, a cardboard cutout of one of those Duck Dynasty duck call making fucks.
I hated that place. I had to leave.
I didn’t want to leave though because leaving the store would take me home to bury my cat and I didn’t want to bury her. A sick fucking chore. I wanted her to be alive and follow me around, watch me brush my teeth and chase stuff and sit on my shoulder as I stayed up all night typing about love and the world being such a goddamn mess. Who was going to watch me brush my teeth now?! Who was going to give a shit about anything I’ve done?! The peeping tom of a backyard I lived next to?”
Fuck that.
But there I was, Nickel retrieved from the basement, shoveling dirt out of the back yard as the body that used to hold her stared through me some more and the backyard screamed deeper, over just a bit, that’s it! Do it just like that!
Death has a hard on older than alarm clocks and grieving and funerals and grave digging is the existential equivalent of post big bang cold universe porn.
Love leads to death
A package deal
You start out almost optimistic,
then heart breaking,
shoveling for love until you realize
the love shoveling turns
always
to the shoveling of death
(this last bit to be read with an Italian accent)
as there can be no erection without the penis
there is never love
without the death
*writing assignment Erotic Chores assigned by Marcus If
I Want To Pack Your Items in a Box That Says ‘Eggs’
I never thought about the fist
coming out of the tunnel before
the tunnel being
it’s sleeve
I never thought about
where turtles come from
I was just ecstatic that they could fly
that first time I watched Gamera
in the bathroom
at the local Walmart
someone in the bathroom
pissed tomato soup
Jabba The Hut loves Twinkies
King Kong might’ve loved
french fries
but instead
King Kong loved
Fay Wray
Expho-lee-ate this!
I’ve got the Pepto Bismo Blues
I can see through everything these days
and still I find everything baffling
our love hopped in a helicopter
but this helicopter’s not landing
and all the parachutes have been laced
with bee shit
and we all know
there’s nothing aerodynamic
about bee shit
so our love hit the ground
like a dump truck
and the ground took the punch
like the tunnel takes the train
when the train has no idea
where it’s going
or which thing to follow
because trains are for the most part
stupid creatures
and love leaves
tracks
like a hearse
in the snow
Dear Pants,
I’m sorry I haven’t washed you lately. You smell sorta upset about it, but I swear I can fix this. There’s plenty of detergent just flopping around in the basement. It’s just, I’ve been busy lately. Ok, not busy really. Despondent perhaps. If only because I’m afraid I’m going to misspell depressed.
And I know there are a couple of pairs of perfectly clean pants downstairs beside the washing machine but it’s just, I haven’t felt like going downstairs. So I’ve been wearing you all week and it isn’t necessary to start nagging me about the underwear again because I know I should start wearing underwear again. I’ll totally start wearing underwear again. I even bought a new pair of silk boxers last week. They were on sale for $4. So maybe they aren’t actually made out of silk.
Forgive me, I’m unsophisticated. Anything that feels slippery I tend to write off as being bullshit or silk. They’re sitting there in the closet next to the front door but I’ve just been sorta too sad to deal with that closet lately. And besides that mornings can be the hardest–if you don’t count late mornings, mid afternoons, all goddamn evening, and the middle of the nights (darlin’ don’t even get me started about those middle of the nights)—and when you throw wearing underwear into the mix it just feels like I’m putting my pants on twice, which feels: exhausting. So I haven’t been wearing underwear. Ok? Sue me. Or please don’t. Because I don’t feel like being the guy who doesn’t wear any underwear in court………
But at least I bought some. (underwear).
Right?
Yes
Baby steps?
Fuck you.
I mean, I apologize.
I’ll do laundry soon. I promise. Just let me check my……….
Ahhhhhh!
We’re so alone.
But we knew that so what else is going on?
It’s snowing outside like a souvenir globe right now.
The TV is suggesting vigilance
This past week is suggesting the world
isn’t the world anymore
it’s something else
because Prince is dead
and in the space of this absence
things are appearing regularly
in their original form of unraveled
to the point where on my way home
earlier this evening I watched a dove
pick a fight with a Corvette
everyone’s fucking like angry guitar solos
Except me.
because I’m all alone
so I jerked off like I was playing
something really complicated
on trombone
and when I’m done doing that
I take my pants the rest of the way off
because they’re dirty
I mean you’re dirty
I mean everything’s dirty
He means “That ain’t Lake Minnetonka”
I mean that’s right
nothing’s gonna get washed tonight
because I’m watching
Purple Rain
on manual repeat
instead
