for fun

The price of life is a question. Metallurgists hunt through the wreckage for dead friends and family and emotions.

 

Billionaires kill, do not have babies, pour south through ice into the tomb of machinists, but those in the ground are tombs of mother and father no more.

 

Head blood already pours dead America. You badly and violently think to erase yourself. As to why, a question silently and violently granted my wish to be removed from Earth, removed violently from Jupiter’s tomb—an exploded electron flailing in the grass, raining from the sky, failing to fucking death.

 

No one can beat you harder and faster or more violently into submission. The violator goes paid or unpaid into service. Regulators die, metallurgists die, violators make billionaires grow sick, their unpaid screams echoing through the tombs—

 

—sun fading like the young and beaten to death. Seeing them dead, my payment.

a response to prayerless hopes

I knew you were high when I read your writing diminish, diminish us. I still thought what we had was chaos, chaotic, but it birthed our new world coherent. I read your destruction when you contacted me again, writing me high so it could be compartmented, so, ignored. But I resumed living the drudgery and feeling the defeated stench of black saltwater lapping our necks. I didn't care what you felt now, and I had nothing to say to you, so I could not write back.

 

about buying a customized poem

A young man, his long, damp-brown hair pulled behind his ears, sat curled over a spiral notebook at a little TV table set up along a high-foot-traffic area. I passed him on my walk to the drug store. He had posted a handmade sign: "custom poems."

 

But he is gathering his things when I pass him again on my way back. "Is it too late to get a poem?"

 

"No, it's not too late," he says, pausing, resetting the table. "What do you want the poem to be about?"

I look down. "How about—when you're about to see old friends after not having seen them in a long time."

 

"Ah. How long has it been?"

 

"At least 10 years."

 

"That's a long time. Okay." He sits down and goes to work. He should take his time, alone.

 

I step away and watch a family take pictures by the city's 20-foot Christmas tree, in front of its white lights' bright confidence in a January evening willing to forget that New Years happen and ever come.

 

Some 5 minutes later he stands, holding a page ripped from his notebook.

 

"Read it and let me know if it makes sense." I read. It's a poem written by a young man. "Does it make sense? Do you like it?"

 

"Yeah. It's good."

"Good. I'm glad you like it."

 

I hand him $10 and thank him. He appreciates it, he says.

 

I should have told him how I really feel about seeing old friends, how conflicted I am. But it's a poem by a young man.