.

I drove back up to Indiana,

It was calm,
I discussed this with a bartender,
Passed the deviating girl at the truck stop
With the still blue eyes,
.
Rode around
Amidst words,
Kept seeing words like
“Can’t” and “won’t”
Piping
Out from the miscellaneous underbrush,
.
And now
After a denouement,
I see motion too,
As I weave through cemeteries.

It gets to what you want, not even what’s right, in the end. I’ve seen it in this decaying city, the girls taking off more and more of their clothes. I used to toggle the words “smart” and “funny”, but now I realize they’re one and same. But the funny ones drop out, they can’t take it, they don’t want to lose it, they want to rediscover the sunshine under time, like they wanted to be all along.

It stands to reason, that as long as there’s some douche bag saying our reality isn’t real, on the weeks when the NFL isn’t interesting, the poetry slam will be, and vice versa. It’s all liquids in our brain, suggesting victoriousness unto the one when the other turns us off.

I can imagine the liberality, though, of trying to protect the multi-billion dollar NFL from the oppressive, tautologically preferable poetry slam, though, because it wouldn’t liberal to actually ADMIT that sometimes in life we’re aided by our own minds. You’re supposed to always keep your eyes on the needy, never to enjoy anything, least of all your own cognition, which is why the discourse of post-modernism survives on the sheer will of droves of lifeless dullards, having apparently emerged during the onset of MTV, Madonna and Michael Jackson, just when everyone was obviously dying to pick up a book.
I went to the poetry slam tonight to try to spend quality time away from my family. Am I allowed to enjoy it, or will the endorphin flow to my brain cause an oppressive, crippling wave of synapse to spread across the crowd, like Agent Orange, deleterious unto the better, liberal, humanitarian thoughts of the unwitting patrons, suspended in sterile virtue for Atlantic and Harper’s photographers, like words.

I once had this friend. He was a little insane.

As far as I knew, he never went to the city, and since I’ve known him he’s migrated to the smaller town, to the east.
Lots of times, he wouldn’t say what was on his mind, but rather something else. But he had the hardened aspect of one who’s father’s died, so you usually just nodded your head to what he said. He was the type to regularly divulge his taste in music, which is one reason I loved him.
As mother nature attempts to efface herself, emitting deep freezes in the north to kill off her own bugs and critters, my friend would efface himself, denying his own belief in the effect of his surroundings, when such a compunction were proper or behooving, which it often was. In doing so, he makes himself miscellaneous, and he’s now successful.
Sometimes I like people’s shoes they have on. Shoes now can come in many colors, I personally own a daisy-yellow pair and a blood-red pair, some other colors are tennis ball color and pink, on girls, and I’m usually happy when someone can be him or herself like this, because such opportunities are in working order. But how can you know you like certain shoes if you don’t dislike others? My friend strikes me as the type who doesn’t dislike any shoes, and he’s very successful, he’s good at me, too, always exuding the sort of innocuous, categorizable acceptance of his surroundings that suggests washing from a cookout back into the personal matters, which I always tried to avoid, but then, that sometimes is the trick.

Looking

Upon the broad stroke,
You see
The difference
Between
The amount of times you
Knew
The right
Thing to
Do, and the amount of times you did it.

There’s

Nothing
To dig
Into
But meat
And it’s
Fresh,
Up from the canyons pined.

Money and the foment,

I guess,
Here again,
As
Uneaten food
Slides
Off the plate.

I drink a Dr. Pepper

At the pinball arcade,
Mischievous
Fun unraveling all
Night long, my Bic
Pen
Refracting
Light
As the plant laments the loss of the mountains.

It was always something, always another black person making fun of me for taking a dump, or telling me how big his genitals were, and then I’d have to go up in front of the class and make a speech, my whole body shaking, I cowered in my room smoking weed and they called the cops, the cloudy mist lures me into perception, a train of men bludgeons in stomping spite within these streets, streets with signs on them, streets so wide, the signs up high, so far away, in the republic, for who? The thought still spins on the hood of this random Chevy Camaro I’m sitting on, and yes, that’s my name, don’t wear it out.

On a house

That’s our
Home, is our home
The
Setting sun
From pool to pool,
News
Reel
To reel
At which
We
Smile,
Braced in disbelief.