Status.

And some days your muscles are on fire, the bones probably embers, like coal burning beneath the ground producing heat.

There is perhaps no obscenity, only obscene people, who take affront to the unabashed freedoms of others, the right to express oneself in a manner most comfortable and fitting. Piss and cock.

Instead of saying, uhg blug rain shmain, we celebrate the sun's unique and rare appearances as nuanced art celibre. And taken further we see intermittent gaps in the frequency of rain as entirely novel occurrences that need our complete attention, with our eyes and ears and dance muscles.

Post Expressionism.

If I had a chapbook, it'd be called "For I am your New God," and on the inverse side of the chapbook, that meaning flipped both over and left to right, "The Year that I broke my Leg." I read someone's thoughts who recently expressed the curiosity, lifelong curiosity, wondering what exactly it feels like to brake their arm. I am not alone. But these titles represent a duality in my life, in which I vacillate between feelings of supremacy and down and out-ness.

Perhaps you think it's something like a manic state. You might be right. But of course I'm exaggerating for effect. But all I'm saying is that some days I can eat 12 pies and win replays at pinball, and some mornings the coffee does nothing and my bicycle legs are frozen meats.

Our bodies, our problems.

I don't know what was medically wrong with this woman's arm, but one was about double the size of the other. It felt like pure fat. How does that happen to just one arm? She was blissfully unaware, and extremely cranky.

And I asked a drunk man to leave us alone at a dive bar when we were playing pool, and he didn't take the hint, so I put my arm around his shoulder and we had a talk. I regretted the way his back was made of cottage cheese curds the size of large marbles. It felt like moth-eaten tofu covered in skin. Like the clay wasn't let to dry properly and bubbles found their way out, and bursting on the surface left craters in the jello.

How does a body get like that?

Cursingive

I started signing my name, David, with an exclamation point, because fuck you, look at me go. David! And it's in all capitals, and I never learned all of the cursive letters. Gradually, I've forgetten every single letter form. Unlike the phoenix memory, these uniquely unvaluable systems, cursive letterforms, forced upon us like some keymaster to the adult world, I never want to return. And and and and as I've gotten older I've gotten more and more and more and more and more tourettic and obsessive and I've got to focus on myself. And so like books are an escape in which I need pictures and when I'm reading nobody is looking at me, and nobody will give me a job with books and it's your fault, but is it really mine. Compromise. I should do that. And they taught me stream of consciousness and I taught them Ayn Rand sucks.

internal frame

Because there's no delay for sight and sound anymore,
now that we've fingered the heavy feeling of
importance
brought on by the feltching significance
self-imposed
of a sunrise
or a landscape
and we've put our friends in front of it,
a row of heads at about the same level,
ruining every shot,
who took the picture
why should I care about the diminished importance of the scene,
too big to frame.

No./

I stopped saying the pledge of allegiance in elementary school,
and quit the cub scouts a few years later.

GOD.

And I think it's totally
fucked-up
that we still cut the skin off a baby's dick
for made up reasons.
That's not yours.

I wouldn't wear a table cloth for the promotion ceremony
in preschool.
That shit looked really lame,
and so did everyone who chose to wear it.
Or did they even realize they had a choice.

And there was no turning back.

Beliefs.

There was a movement towards programs like"This I Believe" for a while. What is is that makes you, you? What, at your core, are your central beliefs?

Damn.

I've never been able to answer that. What don't I believe in; No Sasquatch, God, or any sort of magic. That sort of bullshit. I don't believe in that. But, if it's a constructivist idea they're hitting at, shit. I don't know what I believe in. Do I believe in anything?

Mem

Who's to say what forgetting is,
or when something is forgotten.
Isn't there always the chance that it'll come back?
The phoenix memory.

Confess.

In a comic book you sometimes see a character yell some empty quotation marks:

Or how about what Batman whispers in the ears of criminals who won't confess
something like, where they've hidden the orphans.

I like to imagine what he's saying.
To be more accurate
I sometimes hallucinate, waking with one thought in my head;
I'm going to remove all of your skin.

Oh, so that's what Batman says.

Or maybe he flips it on them.
"Where are the orphans?"

And then in whisper,
"Why are the orphans?"

Or maybe
" !"
which I imagine to be heavy breathing,
or something like when you look a dog in the eyes
and blow air down their nose.

More Bragging, Please! 1/25

I beat the world to Christmas
by playing Feliz Navidad
on October 28th,

Subsequently,
I found a way to get back to Halloween
by singing loudly, Monster Bash
on All Saints Day.

But what they don't know,
Is that I've been ready for my Birthday
since my birthday
last year.

Or as I call it:
Second Christmas, Just for me.

Scandal, Featuring Patty Smyth.

I have some pretty rude things to say to you
____________ (indefinite person of the world)
and for various reasons I have decided not to say them.
___________, I don't appreciate your smile.
I don't see a willing resistance in your eyes, that says,
Man, fuck this.
You're too nice __________ (indefinite and kind individual).
Did you never grow a thick skin? Where are your put-ons?
Show me a front, or else I worry that __________, is going to have a really hard time,
Unless everything goes as planned.
You look like a fresh one, no soured complexion. No bits missing.
Uhg. Without an edge, what's the point.
A piece of clay that, because it hasn't been cooked all the way, can't be broken.
And because it can't be broken, can't cut back. Just some mush. Now, please.
Find your mold and take shape.
I'm not a metaphor. Wordsmyth.

The W Dead

Watching The Walking Dead, I thought that maybe it was an expression of Bede's parable, taken beyond the great hall. It never gets better. And perhaps, symbolically, the dead walk. If you leave the great hall, you enter a place that doesn't get better, and where the dead walk. I don't know. But I'm pretty sure I'm smarter than you.

Mental Masturbation.

Bede

And I was thinking the other day about Bede's Parable,
and I don't care if I remembered it right.
Bede's says something along the lines of

Life and the world as we know it exists inside a great hall.
That hall is the universe.
Outside that hall is everything else,
But it's dark, and we can't see out.

It's a metaphor for life and death, and perceptions.