Bedtime

It began raining, sometime before midnight.

It’s the middle of December, and it hasn’t gotten cold yet. Maybe just a little crispy some nights, but it doesn’t freeze anymore, south of Poughkeepsie, not even at night. Not since last spring. Having lived most of my life in Southern California, a long life so far, you’d think I might welcome a two-year thaw in the Tri-State. The answer to that thought is, no.

A few winters ago, and by “winter” I mean around the time that pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training in Florida and Arizona, I had my picture taken, while lying face down in a foot of front yard snow, wearing nothing but underwear and gloves. It seemed funny at the time; the kind of thing we used to do for social media, when I was a thin-blooded LA transplant, braving the New York elements, swearing to everybody back home that, “It really isn’t that cold here”. Like so many other things about leaving the only life you’ve ever known, for a new one you’ll never really know as home, snow not being cold was the strangest one of all.

Now, with what’s looking like another January in shorts and tee shirts, everyone here is beginning to wonder out loud what summer is going to do to us.

I mean, this is Long Island, so you don’t run into much other than “climate deniers”. The same way you don’t run into much other than pickup trucks with bumper stickers that read TRUMP 2028. But for the first time since I got here, I actually heard the kid behind the counter at Dunkin saying, “The fuck is goin’ on with this weather?” And for the first time since I got here, I actually had the nerve to reply, “Shit, bro, you tell me.”

Last night, on ABC/Newsmax, the blonde woman filling in for the regular anchor, the one who got himself fired for reminding his viewers that he was, in fact, gay, said that the merger of the two broadcasting companies was almost complete, and still right on schedule. Also, that next week’s primetime special featuring the first televised public execution of a political enemy would be shown in its entirety, live at 9 PM Eastern, 6 PM Pacific. Before going to commercial, she reminded her audience that the regularly scheduled episode of Shark Tank would run at its usual time, the following Friday.

I haven’t decided yet if I’ll watch.

I mean, back in ’24, I skipped watching Mike Tyson fight Jake Paul because it wasn’t going to start till after my bedtime, so what makes the network think I’ll still be up when they finally get around to the main event, sometime after ten? Also, that seems like it’s probably past the executed’s bedtime, as well.

Maybe he’ll be asleep before it happens, too.

Poetry Slam Screamer




Everything is wrong.  

The world is going to end 
before I write a poem worthy of 
the end of the world, and 
that’s worse than when I had 
cancer and found out about it 
when I peed blood into my toilet 
on the night Michelle Obama 
gave her speech at the 
Democratic National Convention.  

Worse than when 
the...

(REDACTED... for now)

                   ...be happy forever, and 
worse than when my first-born son
was given a death sentence, 
less than an hour after drawing breath.  

A poet’s inner monologue is trauma porn, 
looking for an audience to suffer it with.  

This isn’t the best poem 
I ever wrote.  It’s basically shit.  
It’s true, but shit nonetheless.  
And you need to know that 
when I started writing this, 
I had every intention for 
better than some 
fourth-runner-up-in-a-poetry-slam 
screamer.

I apologize for that.  
And if I ever read this 
in a coffee house, or 
lower-case-god forbid, on stage, 
in the spotlight, I promise 
to turn in my page poet card 
on the way out the door.
At least I was right when 
I said, 

everything is wrong.

Today’s Break in the Month of November Has Been Brought to You by…

Now that I have you’re attention, and poured my next cup of it’s barely still morning coffee, while at the same time re-re-re-re-rerere-watching that Kaiju Classic, War of the Gargantuas on PlutoTV, I’ve concluded that this is a no poetry today kinda day.

Albert Camus, in his book The Myth of Sisyphus, wrote, “I do not know whether or not this world has a meaning which transcends it”.

Damn.

See, a couple of times already this month, I’ve experienced what I will call… because it sounds way cooler… “Existential Gaps” in my bloggy output. The first lasting three days, the other, four. Each of these gaps was closed by a kind of controlled manic episode, akin to something lots of people fall into when they fully grasp that guests are on their way, and nobody has cleaned the kitchen stove, or the bathroom toilet, in weeks. So they end up two-fisting all the cleaning supplies and turn everything soiled into spotless, just in time for their guests to walk, smiling, through the front door, and into the cloud of Comet, Windex, and Dow Scrubbing Bubbles, hanging in the air that surrounds them.

My reason for these November gaps, and the mania that closed them, was a combination of a simple, week-long common cold, and the intermittent affliction Camus wrote about, that comes in the form of…

(Okay, War of the Gargantuas is over. Now it’s time to make soup and watch the end of another treatise on fictional existential realities, Good Will Hunting)

…I don’t know, a glitch in momentum? Like, not wanting to make a big deal out of a sore throat and clogged sinuses when thirty-something percent of my immediate friends suffer from debilitating chronic illnesses? Or yeah, maybe it’s that I still haven’t fully come to grips with whether or not Camus was right, or if giving a shit that you complete 30 days of blogging at this time in human history even matters, when most of us are hoping that what we do today matter when we’re gone.

So will it? Will it matter?

If by transcendent, you mean will what I do here echo in some non-corporeal ether, because something I did in this life had a component of righteous efficacy? Well, that’s a HELL NO. Did I used to believe that? Yes. In fact, I used to TEACH that, although you’re only ever gonna get the full story out of me with offers of cheesecake, bourbon, and a puppy. But if by transcendent, you mean will what I do here, or say here, echo in the hearts and minds of those to whom I did the doing or the saying? If THAT’S what you mean, that’s a HELL YES.

And just so you know, I love Albert Camus almost as much as I love cheesecake, bourbon, puppies, the Los Angeles Dodgers, Kaiju movies, and nailing the answer to the Final Jeopardy! clue, every night, Monday through Friday at 7:23 pm, by the grace of some nebulous god, my great big brain, and the lickable corner store temporary stamp tattoos, chock full of so much timed-release LSD my tiny ten-year-old self ingested that, to this day, I can still remember things I’m not even sure I ever learned, as long as you give me thirty seconds, and hum the Final Jeopardy! jingle.

And yet, I still haven’t memorized a single one of my old poems.

Anyway, for a day that started out pretty bleak, what with the existential dread and all, I feel better now, so there’s that. And maybe going forward, I’ll think a little differently about transcendence. Also, if you’ve got cheesecake, bourbon, and a puppy, have I got a story for you.

Talk to you tomorrow.

Lie to You




Today, 
I would lie to you, 
just to make you feel better.

Tomorrow,
I would tell you the truth, 
for the same damn reason.  

Both of these are probably love.

Some day,
I hope you’ll do 
the same for me.

Proletariat Kinks




If we could burn the world down 
together, would that make us a match 
made in hell?  

And will you only want me when 
things get hot, or is it that you 
can’t stand seeing the world on fire, 
all alone?  

I know the likelihood of these being 
answers on a dating profile are about 
as slim-to-none as us actually 
burning anything down, 

together or apart, but I think, 
as questions go, they’re more important 
than what we want to eat on 
our first date.  

Questions which, should we ask them, 
might make our first date, 
our last.  

I’m not unstable, I swear.  No more 
than any other high-functioning anarchist, 
living in a world where life is measured 
paycheck-to-paycheck, 

and death, in how soon we finish 
grieving, and get back to measuring 
paychecks.  Maybe if Soylent Green 
was billionaires.  

But until that dream is real, maybe 
we could start by striking that match, 
lighting some candles, and talking about 
our proletariat kinks.  

Mine involve a double scoop of 
chocolate ice cream, served at a parade, 
on the first day of May.

Time Travel Isn’t Real




A long story, a lot shorter.

There’s a line that goes, 
you can love someone and know 
you’re not supposed to be with them.  

And there’s another line that goes, 
you can know you’re not supposed to be 
with them, and still love someone.  

I think that’s worse.  
Read it again.  I’ll wait.

The way the word, MELANCHOLY, 
is worse than I thought it was 
before I Googled it.  Shit.  
Worse.  Apt, but worse.  

The way I’ve become a cliché is worse.  
Maybe I should Google the word CLICHÉ, 
but that might be a bad idea, because 
MELANCHOLY.  

Yep, it was worse.
Don’t read that again.  Just don’t.  

There’s a line that goes, 
you can do ninety-nine things right, 
and one thing wrong.  

I fell in love.  That wasn’t 
the one thing.  I’ll never know 
what the one thing was.  

Now I think that’s worse.  Fuck.  
ShitFuckFuckShitFuck.  Just fuck.  
And I wish time travel was real.  

Time travel isn’t real.  Fuck.

“Hello…

…What’s going on? How are you?”

I know, asking that doesn’t help. Personally, after November, I’m thinking of writing a book of pre-, mid-, and post-dyspocalypstopian* short stories that try to make sense of all… okay, any… of this life. And not just this last week, or the last three months before that, or even the last thirty years before that.

Stories take a long time to tell. Stories take even longer to tell themselves.

So I’ve made my mind up that these are the stories I’m going to tell. Something I failed to mention in the first post of this month was that I believe, and have believed for some time, that my poetry career is coming to a close, and that thing I have always wanted to write… scary stories… is about to find its way onto my horizon. I’ve been influenced by scary stories my whole life. Kaiju. Zombies. The childhood fears of Stephen King. The whole catalogue of Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone. Depending on what decade, these were my bedtime stories. I mean, even now, I still doze off at night to reruns of Kolchak: The Night Stalker. All of these are straight up cautionary tales of what happens when humanity forgets what it means to remain human in the midst of a fucked up world.

And as far as I can see, like with those times long ago, there is no better time than now for me to resurrect this genre for fun and profit. You know, like Gage Creed’s dad did for him in Pet Sematary. Just a little object lesson that hopefully works out better for me than it did for all of them.

So while I’ve got you, tell me.

What kind of stories to you want to hear out of me, when the poetry has all dried up, and there’s only one kind of tale left to tell? Let me know in the comments. I can’t wait to read what YOU have to say.

Talk to you tomorrow.

dyspocalypstopian*, a portmanteau that stands for dystopian apocalyptic literature. a neologism. one that I just made up

Tomahawk Chop





Every October, when a Georgia racist’s 
     thoughts turn themselves towards the 
          Major League Baseball Playoffs in Atlanta, 
               and that sell-out crowd 41,500 fans drive their 
          team to rally, with a rousing Tomahawk Chop, 
     and a boisterous sing-a-long of Pow Wow the Indian Boy*, 
what I root for is everyone in the stands to swiftly			
     and mysteriously come down with 41,500 cases of terminal 
          small pox, embedded in all the free rally towels, 
     donated courtesy of the recompense of God.



*a song composed in 1949 by Monty Kelly, and popularized on the 
CBS children’s morning television program Captain Kangaroo