I went to the doctor today
and he told me
to stop walking so much
because I have a bad knee,
but I don’t have a car,
because I wrecked it,
and I don’t have a bike,
because it was stolen,
but I have a knee
because no one wants
to steal my knee
and I haven’t figured out
yet
how to wreck it,
beyond the pain
I have,
and the doc
tells me,
swear to God,
later,
that he wishes he never became a doctor,
which is a weird thing to say.
Imagine you’re in third grade
and the teacher asks you to stay
after class
and you think
you’re in trouble
but the teacher just says,
“Whatever you do,
never become a teacher.”
Or you die
and go to the Pearly Gates
and God’s standing there,
Head in His Hands
and He says,
“Whatever you do, never
become God.
You have no idea
the hours.”
And the doc tells me to stop walking on it,
but how do I get home?
Fly?
Float?
I have no money.
I have a knee.
I’d trade my knee
for money.
The shittiest sex worker
on the planet.
That’s me.
You’re free to go now.
This girl came over
and fucked me.
I told her
I wouldn’t fuck her,
not on a first date,
and she said, fine,
she’d just sleep over
then
and so we got into bed
and went to bed
and I woke up
and she was kissing
my throat,
the inside
of my throat.
She’d crawled
passed my teeth
and went down
that dark tunnel
of my neck
and started making out
with my epithelium
or whatever it’s called
and it got me hot
and I got hard
and she came out
and got on top
and fucked
kinda like she was insane,
telling me
she was a figure skater
for the Japanese
national team
and now she was a law student
at Yale
or Jail
or whatever it’s called and
she was learning
how to sue
anyone
for any
amount of money
she wanted
and she wanted
a lot of money,
but she didn’t want it now.
Now
she just wanted to fuck me
and she held me down
and seizured
and earthquaked
and raged
how some people
fuck
like it’s Armageddon,
the day,
not the movie,
and I just laid there
realizing
it’d never get
more
intense
than this
and she got done
and we were lying there
and she said,
“I thought you weren’t going to fuck me”
and she said,
“The problem is
I get anything I want”
and she started to put her clothes on
to leave,
and I told her to stay
and she said,
“I just wanted to fuck you.
I don’t care about you.
I just wanted to fuck you.”
And she walked out of the door,
closing it
not all the way
so that the winter
kept making its way in,
and,
to the walls,
I said,
“Well,
boy,
she sure taught me a lesson.”
And the walls didn’t
say
anything
back,
because no one gives a fuck about
walls.
I was reading this poem by Tomas Transförmers
called “The Open Window”
and my brother said,
“What you reading?”
and I said, “Some poem by a guy named Tomas Transförmers or something like that”
and he said, “You mean like the movie where cars turn into robots”
and I say yeah
and my brother told me to read the poem,
so I read I stood shaving one morning
and Grew into a helicopter
and my brother said, “Wait,
you’re telling me this guy turned into a helicopter?”
And I said, “Yeah, I think so, but I don’t understand the poem,
because I never understand poems.”
And he said, “Don’t you write poems?”
“But I also do math
for math class,” I said, “And I don’t understand math
or math class,”
and he said, “True dat,”
and he asked if that poet guy’s poems are all about people turning into robots
and I said I think so
and told him he won the Nobel Prize
and my brother said, “For what? Chemistry?”
And I said, “No, Literature.”
And he said, “Why don’t you do that?”
And I said, “What?”
And he said, “Win the Nobel Prize for
Chemistry,
or write poems about robots
or cool stuff like that.”
And I said, “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it”
and he left the room to go masturbate to MMA
and I pondered what he said to me,
because my brother’s a bit like Confucius
if Confucius
was an idiot
with a mustache
that looks like
it’s a slowly dying caterpillar
with tuberculosis
or the flu
or one of those things
you can get.
This poem has to be short,
because I have to work tomorrow.
I always have to work tomorrow,
which means I always have to write short poems.
If I didn’t have to work,
I’d write a poem the length of the moon landing.
I’d write a poem longer than the Detroit Pistons.
I’d write a poem the length of the sun’s puking guts.
I’d write a poem where you’d be so sick of it
you’d shoot yourself in the scrotum,
but I don’t have time to do that,
so your scrotum is lucky.
Otherwise your scrotum would be ska-rewed!
And not in the good way.
I mean in the way that the NRA does.
Where they don’t care about life,
just money
and destruction
When I die, my hometown will yawn and
go back to bed
and then wake up
late for work
and have to hurry up
and eat
in the shower
getting water
in the cereal bowl
and leaving
without being able to piss
and then pisses its pants
on the commute
and showing up to work
with its pants
full of piss,
so that’s what my hometown gets
for yawning at my death.
Assholes.
They should have gave me something posthumous.
Like a truck
or something.
A free truck.
Something like that.
I get the rejection from the literary agent who says we’re not taking any white men for representation at this time and I write back saying,
How do you know I’m white
or a man?
Could you just tell
from the words
on the page?
Are my words so white
that even ghosts
would confuse them
with snow?
Are my sentences
so male
that the periods
that end them
are little testicles?
Look,
here’s one now.
And another.
All these balls
all over the page.
Balls balls balls . . .
Everywhere.
My God,
I’d reject them too.
Who wants to look at that many sagging
periods?
It’s depressing as oatmeal.
And don’t get me started
on the exclamation points!
But, literary agent,
what about the white disabled men?
And the white trans men?
And the white blind men?
And the white gay men?
And the white mute men?
And the white milkmen?
And the white male veterans?
And the white male chefs?
And the white male bail bondsman?
What about them?
Are their stories to be silenced?
Do you want no stories whatsoever
from the white–male–bail–bondsman perspective?
What will happen to those narratives?
Will they die
and be cremated
in a wood stove?
I have a confession, literary agent.
I see myself as mixed.
I’ve dated trans.
My ancestors are part Finnish and part island.
Half of these periods were actually
vaginas.
You cannot control my identity.
I am made out of wood.
I am a shit in the night.
I meant to say ship.
I have ruined my life.
I have ruined the oceans.
I have ruined the peaceful deaths of ash.
Sincerely,
Ron
P.S. Do you like Baxter Dury’s “Miami”?
How about Alcatraz?
