we can watch but it's not ours

it is such a live stream, it is like you can almost feel. you can touch every brown dude and smell his arms linked his stranger his nothing left to lose but anger and his national heritage. you can click refresh. heritage is losing, dear god they got the mummies and you can think i am really a part of something like history. you can think especially if i leave an embittered comment. you can be like no solution is easy be sensible cynical humanistic. now they know i'm on their side and i agree that they are people and complex in a complex world.

wonderful angry something we gave up for a softcore youth.

wonderful angry something you are almost jealous. our streets are for walking and our phone conversations guarded jealousy irony. you say because there's nothing left to throw rocks at and they don't count because i recognize the ecology i've read about but i don't see it cause i stay on my side but tell my married friends i don't. you can say listen. i know all the names of the philly bums west of the river. and not just their descriptive epithets. wheelchair bridge bum his fucking name is Ezra.

YOU WOULD NOT TAKE TO THE STREETS FOR ANYTHING BUT BASEBALL.

jealous because the rage  is your best kept secret call it self control

[superimpose the neighborhood west of 50th and shudder. if shoulder to shoulder were a choice you'd choose your parents' spare room and abandon every part of them we gentrified]

i fit in here too.

I told the last one the same thing cause that’s just how I operate. You might be a fuck up, but you need to have morals.

We will have one good week. We will have honest conversation. We will increase our intimacy by 13.5%. I will put the finishing touches on a pseudo-autobiographical-fictional piece and I will send it to you and my best friend Lauren. You will tell me how it made you cry, how it was the first Google doc to make you cry and I’ll be like, ‘I can really feel that extra 13.5% of intimacy.’ I won’t feel obliged to have sex with you but will delight in making you some curry. That way you know I’m not just using you for emotional support or for sex.

Then, upon review, I will realize that my project is too ambitious and the tenses are all wrong and really, writing this makes me feel like a whore or sell out at least if I’m trying to be honest. As I shop for panties at H&M, my mind goes: ‘Like who really cares about some skinny kid who says bad words like who really cares about some fourth grader’s sexual fantasies like who even wants you? Name one person.’ I’ll send you a text and stand on your porch and I will do that thing where I cover my ears and writhe around under the comforters and it will freak you out. Like nobody wants you. You will really freak out.

[from  "DSM-IV code 301.83"]

The Quake 4.0

We all gather at our coasts

and mountain ranges, unwired.

The most defined nose bridges.

Pixelation has our eyes like eagles.

Perfectly, digitally formed gods ready

to seal our hands in the clay:

The first thoroughly graceful organism.


[from 'Christmas Scene #2']

at the height of things.

Any lull in a dinner party

shamefully and automatically cured:

watching people get tazed on youtube

watching fat people do things on youtube

watching 'real life martial artists' on youtube

watching that lady crush things with her boobs on youtube

watching channing get hit in the head by her closet door on youtube

watching channing get hit in the head by her closet door on youtube

watching channing get hit in the head by her closet door on youtube

watching channing get hit in the head by her closet door on youtube

watching channing get hit in the head by her closet door on youtube

watching channing get hit in the head by her closet door on youtube

watching people singing horribly in church on youtube

watching the drama that is that little fat hood kid who stole his gramma's SUV unfold on youtube

watching episodes of unhappily ever after on youtube.

and AT THE HEIGHT OF THINGS

I say, 'Let's watch black people fighting.'

And then,  'No. Let's watch WHITE PEOPLE fighting.'

pretty dumb most of the time.

guy at the raven lounge was like
what, you be thinkin about
philosophy and shit all the time?

and i was like nah,
usually sex and facebook.

at times it's theory
which makes it lofty
like eroticism
and the noosphere

but it's mostly like
picturing the genitals of strangers
and like..
well, facebook.

friendship means nice tags and things

glowing maternally

you don't wake up from a dream of being raped and stumble for
you wake up from a dream of being raped and fumble for
your husband or your phone to call your husband who is at work
or for your boyfriend who is sleeping next to you or your phone
to call your best friend and life partner or your mom if you
still have a mom or your sister in law or lesser friends who also
know you have problems with dreaming and will be understanding
at 3:45 in the morning.
you do not stumble for a laptop.

someone teach me some new way to live.