Catcalling the Nightmare

Scattered about the globe in lichenoid darkness, Los Angeles looks like some schizo teen lit up her backne with a sparkler. The story of this land is slighted by the exposition of its people. Someone arranged their athlete’s foot into an economy. A country too expensive to suffer hyperbole, we treat our breastmilk like it comes with tokens here. Buy anything to commiserate with genocide in 3D. I call no pulse on the skyline. The toddler behind me has been skipping my sphincter across whatever cleats his parents delightedly velcroed him into and no one is brave enough to deposit him slantways down the aircraft lavatory and disperse his collegiate gain upon the stratosphere so we can avoid the turbulence of his impending, regrettable first thought. If only there were something on the wing. An understudy of a stewardess rolls onstage in defiance of the agonizing grid work beneath us. She says the horizon reminds her of a porcupine fucked to death by light sabers one sleazy Christmas ago. This welcoming desert pleasantly crapped me through its sand. Even the breeze has potential. Men all showing tendons blown up on gym memberships and a perpetual sense of self, like they leapt into the same constricted tunic, slingshot west to buy thousand dollar hair gels, waitresses lighter than their gum, fresh from the salon with nothing but a screen test above the neck. Everything the brochure said to write about was written for me before I began to masturbate and we haven’t even landed yet.

Associated Writers Prostitution

AWP is a conglomerate book world Valkyrie riding the windpipe of academia into a version of sports I came to perform my Kegels under. They charge five hundred dollars a day to conference with game bosses. I have a ganked pass and bought my flight four years in advance to afford the bad taste in my mouth. All lit mags compete to the death in one gymnasium and the audience is using their saliva to place bets. I wept with quiet precision. I came to have it officially confirmed that I never mattered, that my lifelong travails in the field will amount to scrap paper if I’m truly gifted, an enterprise redundant in its deepest polka. AWP 2016: were we lemmings, at least there would be the promise of a cliff. AWP 2016: today’s word is inconclusive, is impartial, is die. Can't tie a bow tie around your disease. It’s hip to hate it, so I shaved, put on my best used car salesmen fucked his valet to win at suicide suit, and worked those tables. Blacklist, please.

Bookfair

A proper bookfair has to be pieced together from blackout drinking. Violence is something you can only appreciate in retrospect. I seem to recall informing anyone with the potential to help me at a modicum of career not to bother because I’m entirely bound for le morgue. Seems beneficial after being ignored this long. Crazy like a fox hanging from its tail. Hey, babe. I’m dragged through life like a comet with fleas. I can only come during traffic court. I’m that perpetually unimpressive. I apologize for my every despicable civility. Get indifferent in the network with me. They were shouting moo at the line we partook of to get in. Upon entering my hotel, I exited my hotel and found a store in which to buy a boxcutter. My body is an effigy of what my brain wants done to it. The brain really yearns to drive the struggling meat towards a cemetery. I may not like having to breathe, but I pick when that ends and will leave scars across anyone who tries too soon. Such is my writing policy. I pray to leave some surgeries behind, will end up resident of the biohazard bin at best. Mostly the blade is for if someone insults my work to my face. And to open boxes.

Conference on Violence

Am I showing myself as someone incapable of editorial control or am I just not religious enough to declare reveling in writing and reading mayhem is indulgent? Leave it to a fiction panel to morph the written word into a moral qualm where too much blood is concerned. Do writers get together to blow whistles at each other like a roving pack of hall monitors? Are we not in LA to knock boots and scarf cocaine? More on how none of that occurred later. The only brand of blowing out here is whoever shushes you at a reading. Is penning a row no longer a picnic? Or we can’t say it is without jailing our pretend readership? I shouldn’t tackle anyone and scream in their ear for juice then? Are we too institutionalized for some heady horseplay between the bowels? Not only do I not care if the torture depicted in my zippy dramas will never change the fucking planet one iota, I hope it causes as much fucking harm as there already is, thank you.

Another Mad White Boy Beholds Another Women’s Rights

I come to rock the thunderdome in support of broads. Hows can how I don't matter be of soyviss? Ahem. Whites cannot become fully woke on the topic of race because they were never presented with the strife to even handle the bald realization of their unchecked arrogance (outside the reiteration that it exists, and that's our primary malfunction: existence, or so I'm told). We can barely confront the most typical racial faux pas without our nervous systems collapsing into defensive strategies, alternating atonement via hatred. Think of how that weakness might handle a view to the boundless slaughter it causes in the name of tanning beds. The magazines clouted by colleagues bespeak their whiteface innately. No one rubs the black off a submission to appease some invisible literary KKK. It’s far lousier than that. It’s airborne and undefeatable, the status quo. Another fuck it anyone with the slightest discrepancy has to teach themselves the riddles for. Caught in the lingual death throes of my own necktie, what statement, let alone argument, could I preposterously gamble against an association led, in part, by a favorite poet of mine? I appreciate her patience with that I was ever in a room. I have entered the discourse of my colonoscopy. Nothing I conjecture has stained the bottom of the fridge. If this poet addressed me, I would hop down my vocal chords and perform a pap smear on myself. The top compliment I can say to a writer is I believe your pain above mine. Now I hope to steal it from you with a spectacular self-immolation. My pain is catching up and the fantasy is anyone might assist me with it. Luckily, many have, under whom I proceed to crawl, clapping. Pardon, I love playing peekaboo with social mores. If I’m like the rest, let it be symptomatic of my solipsistic venture from handshake to emo tantrum. Pseudo intellectual fear has replaced creativity so well we can’t even say the word art anymore without giggling. Frat lads turn to scribbling because the college that wants to act so maternal against their shitty method spent the money to support the belief art is fucking possible for Brent in the first place. I must be inducted into some luxuriant polo session the second I have a drink in my hand and there’s more than one of me nearby. I tend to clock that we come from white supremacy in the form of self-punishment by dining out at the drive thru. If you’re an oppressed people, I’m like to like your style more before I steal it, but usually the operative word is regardless. Remain any type of fucking person and who should waste the effort to continue placating the sum of you, despite the hypnosis of white guilt? I’ve bustled across the puke with the intention of touring what others wearing my uniform have been barely letting you survive against for centuries and the only political statement I’m interested in is why is it so selfish to dream that you’ll kill me apropos of all white boys’ original sin? Is whatever patterns its Mobius strip around my hackneyed arousal too troubling to block? There are no words for my looking like what’s been done to you. Cut my eyes out to make them blue again, pretty please. Are you no longer my maid if the order is for you to slit my throat? The pigs will shoot you whether you do or don’t. It’s the one exception that cancels both our lies. Somehow I’m allowed to pull a five dollar suit out of thin air and pass through skid row giggling at any sense of community. Responsible? Oops, poet first, citizen last. Everything we do is privileged. The second I try to help you on the page, I am calling you a double slur with my lips sealed like a gloryhole full of barn hay. That’s the one box we can all check, if we grew up in America and afford to squabble in the basest syntax. I mean a type of burn it all down the CIA would never back me up on. Sure, let me contribute to the conversation: I know my cunt is scared of its shadow and I urgently beg for life to be over. I’d say use my bones to build your new community, but they are too fucking brittle from typing 24/7 about communities being swill. Perhaps the mentally ill will come back into literary fashion a few years from now and I can lecture you. But I will do it from a goddamn dumpster. You’ll only catch me conferencing with my poor sense of bladder control. If you kill enough of us, it won’t matter how solipsistic we were beforehand, or if we smiled under the blade. Is my presence telling you to eat cake? Don’t be a guillotine tease. You brought the camo, yet I am horribly alive. Patron of the most browbeat generation of so-called men, tattling on one another and banning books left and right. We’re all perpetrators of the same manufactured rape that comes with a citation by its college. Meaning well, trying to help out, sad we can’t, accepting that we’re evaded PR agents, puddled by shaming because we value status over a classic fuck you. The floor is quite literally ours and we’re using ourselves to clean it. Hysterically, men's rights groups have happened. Your shit don’t ban itself, it deserves to stay a manuscript. It wants to be graffiti, but it’s just a page. I need a bullet through every audience, but I only kicked a chair. No one should be selfless near a keyboard. I agree that there is no more room for my fat voice, which is the reason I’m talking anyway. Test me on my will to live. Poem bro will lend a wrist, not a hand. The revolution is boring. Let it pee in verse. Sometimes I wish nothing mattered harder. There’s nothing a weapon couldn’t better explain. Fuck if I know. I’m a fan.

Reading

Mister persona non grata par excellence scared up a listing. One visits a handful of old friends, tricked into thinking things are okay. No more here comes that ingrate with the seppuku routine. I’m the happiest nametag in the village tonight. Maybe I think a life is available, lol. Go home and stare at the floor another five years, champ? Someone will produce the fabled picket fence inside this very loft, produce it directly from my anus to god’s throat and we’ll share tattoos of our favorite charity. When someone is kind to me, I stutter because I’m trying to pause time. But, wait. Was I a little too yippy? I stood puzzled in the architecture, next to my poor etiquette of concurrent readings. Keep in mind, I’m that filmgoer who paws a knife if people chat me out of my trance. So when one of the prettier X-Men shushed me with the righteous anger of an intern just fired from Seventeen Magazine (missed their booth), I about dove out the window to apologize. I had much been drinking. I require plenty of school principal ‘tude to assure me how nothing I am, especially if I’m featured. See me with a mic anywhere and feel free to converse. If I’m holding a mic, I aim to choke you with the cord, whether you’re a good participant or not. All I could muster was to half-ass Karate Kid a chair into Seven Eleven’s prop department. Consider yourselves lucky, LA. I mean, consider me a placemat for your cigarettes. Nothing I say can beat tobacco. Was no one potty trained by Courtney Love? I had a great fear of being flirted with, because consent went the way of the dodo. Not to worry, folks. White boy only marked his greasy family with a pillow. I’m a beefy target for that version of baited mockery where my insane response will come back to haunt me the second I land anywhere major. Joke’s on you, I never will, and I will speak to you from the source of loserdom because the full extent of that term means I get to go full bushido willy-nilly. I only ever wrote to burn my fucking name to the ground. Let the big dicks handle truth, that rustic, humanistic hallmark. I’ll modify my idioms like a rather challenging peanut. Keep up my reach-around on aphorisms. I’m glad to be the laughingstock of my autopsy table. Court jester enacts a fraction of their execution, if they even earn one. Poet's born swabbed in enough clown makeup to clog the guillotine. I burble over with stock phrases too neurotic for explication. If I say I’m a fan, I mean it. I make buzz sounds when I read you. I’m a cartwheel boy. My big problem is I love all forms of lit and love is a frailty in every format. Everything I do is composed of confused fetishes. Promise I’m a worm. I show respect to fellow practitioners who have also done this to themselves. It’s called submission for a reason. Stake a penny on your existence for a stamp or two. The reward is the internet has made mundane outlaws out of all of us. I try not to register. Worst of all I was nice.

Epilogue: I Know My Fucking Place, Dare I Call It Place, My Snubbed Vocation, I Get It, Give Up, the Organism Has Been Informed

I was born at large to genuflect before blasé cab drivers in self-churned heat. To pay them twenty dollars per mile for a mental pacifier about my location where ever. After living out my delay, I briefly met a writer crush: Jarett Kobek. Everything he’s interviewed about feels carved from a mania against how shit’s ordered. He’s not weighted with the policy and promotion of one’s do-right profile. The work itself is an art of dirty journalism weaved with character into fictions that can hum. He’s like if I mattered. If I weren’t always giving myself prostate exam after prostate exam with a potpourri of verse. The meeting was appropriate. A bar riddled by its jukebox. I told him I’m a fan. I cannot hear you, he replied. Trust me, sir, none should.