Current Status
Ate lunch at the zoo
Caught up with beloved son
And baby zebra
Why don’t you go shut up
Why don’t you go write a poem
Why don’t you go cry about it
Why don’t you go make up a story
Why don’t you go get out of my face
Why don’t you go draw a picture
Why don’t you go do me a favor
Why don’t you go do it already
Why don’t you go
Get it over with
1. This week six different medical paraprofessionals and three computers asked me for my date of birth. My date of birth hurts because it will be forgotten, and the date of my death hurts because it goes unrecognized every year.
2. My hips feel like an accordion that a demon monkey is playing.
3. My back feels like an egg with a baby pterodactyl inside trying to claw its way out. I mean I couldn’t be better.
4. MRI, DMV, and department meeting all on the same day as my manuscript gets rejected.
5. When Everybody Hurts by REM comes on the radio, I want to punch Michael Stipe in the nuts and force him, at gunpoint, to sing the chorus again. I feel like what that chorus would sound like.
6. Like a version of Ground Hog Day in which Bill Murray’s character was in a car accident yesterday but has to go to work today anyway. I mean I’m fine, and you?
7. Sort of the physical equivalent of the distress I felt when some dude filmed and distributed nudes of my daughter.
8. You don’t want to know. I mean I’m good, thanks.
9. I feel the way that dude who sold nudes of my daughter would have felt if I’d caught up with him, knowing I could exact revenge with no legal penalties.
10. You really don’t want to know.
Her love was a misheard lyric,
deafened by the silibant air
rushing through the cracked
car window on the first date.
It went unoticed at the start—
they made such glorious music
together—the rhythym of libido
and chorus of new infatuation
intertwined into a melody loud
enough to drown out discord
and it wasn’t until the last note
faded to the faint metronome
tick of married life that she first
heard the asynchronous clash
of their voices, and wondered
if it was still possible for them
to discover a new song to sing.
As I sit here contemplating this poem,
a few too many things clamor for my mind.
It’s the end of another long workday
and I don’t want to give anything else the time.
Sleep is looking mighty damn fine as a way
to bring down another routine tomorrow
but I put it off for an additional hour or so for why,
why do I run myself into another sorrow?
Mental health awareness.
I heard those three words every day
throughout the month of May
(the ‘awareness’ month) and I wonder
do we listen to what we say?
Do we even know what it means
to keep an eye out for signs
when the first glimmer of trouble
sends us hiding, closing all the blinds?
Mental health awareness.
What happens when what you love turns noxious,
when a healthy challenge becomees an obstacle?
I’m tired of always putting up a fight, I just long
to throw in the towel and declare today impossible.
What happens when the written word
no longer satisfies the breaking heart,
when pen and paper just aren’t enough anymore
so why even try to start?
Mental health awareness.
I’m always watching for the signs in others,
but do I pay enough attention to myself?
Like the sun in the sky, ever beaming outwards,
how often do I check if I am well?
This desire to do good is like loose cargo
in a ship battered by storm-thrown waves,
my balance is off from a fundamental shift
of emotion, of spirit, away from anything that saves.
Mental health awareness.
Digging deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper
mining every strain of me for the next improbable story,
because law of averages assumes good will happen, right?
Maybe God won’t always ignore me?
And I don’t know if there’s anything left to find
and maybe that’s the point.
There is rarely just one solitary avenue
to keeping mind and happiness conjoined.
Because mental health awareness
is the responsibility to recognize when
maybe you yourself can no longer do this alone.
There’s no subsititute for a human connection
as sharing a secret, to me, has shown.
Where written word fails, speak it. Crescendo.
Sometimes you need to draw in the power of another soul.
May God bless those who have held me in recent nights
for darkness should never swallow any of us whole.
it’s the last day
i might as well have a little fun
walking down the street
my voice so high
mucus fills my throat
“back it up! back it up”
“you got a membership!”
“you got a wristband!”
i pinch my fingers in the air
when asking for a fake card
my stomach hurts from the laughter
running into my friend’s legs
because i can’t see where im walking
maybe the trip wasn’t so bad
I drive my brand new big black jacked-up truck
into my MAGA neighbor’s side yard grass.
(I hope he won’t decide to kick my ass.)
He looks at me, surprised, says What the f- – -?
“How ‘bout we light firecrackers for good luck
since the Fourth of July’s about to pass?
Let’s bond like two White lower-middle-class
heterosexual males run amuck.”
My quite snow-flakey invite draws a sneer.
Firecrackers? Sparklers? Sounds like Hillary.
“But they’re loud and pretty and light the night.
Can’t we share deviled eggs, wave flags, and cheer?”
He lifts aloft a stick of TNT.
Trump’s jailbreak will take some dynamite.
do not attempt to revive old pleasures. the dead
always come back wrong. memory is fickle, romantic,
and a liar. the poet skips arm in arm with it, feeds
its hearth, encourages the crackle and spit. then arrives
at his own childhood doorstep and finds new vignettes
on the mantel, new rusted necklaces in the jewelry box,
new toy blocks scattered across the floor like divinatory
constellations. his stains washed, his mistakes bleached,
his mark smoothed over and reupholstered.
wrench yourself from that hooked elbow before
you barge into the new age with its new sentiments
and all dismissal.
board the train away before you find yourself a stranger
in the house of those who told you never to become one.
