Wordplay

Do you ever forget everything about yourself? Driving home drunk through the rain, trying to piece together the bits you can remember: listing events that happened, friends' names, influences you surely had, ideas that were once important. Trying to form some human shape from the frays?

Do you shuffle through your damaged cellphone on wet patios, hoping the physical mechanic will make you less terrifying to groups of young women discussing reddit and Mingus? Hoping for a moment another will play initiative, just one time, to juxtapose the backdrop of a hundred tries and dead-ends? I too know the Clown exists.

Do you build word games? And repeat them aloud like a chant to ward through the day? On sunny mornings in dirt fields I made many laughing: Polyp poppin' papas putting pasta in the pot. The clown ground his crown down. I make them still, but they are different: faggot kike dyke nigger ass full of cum, cunt in the morning light, cock when day is done. During the hour drive to/from work I hang out the car window and yell it at people stuck in traffic going the other way, yell it to their faces. It's out of loving hatred, I promise. But for who?

Words are utensils, there to cut the meat.

Are you haunted by fallen friends' specters? Steeled against/through mundane labor, remembering in your bones what it is to do worse, knowing from example what lurks below man's poverty baseline? Do white ghosts chase you down the alleyway? And get high? Do you say never again and hunt every friend/cousin/acquaintance looking for a job, hook them up only to watch them crumble?

Do you feel on rainy drunken nights, left only with a keyboard, that some ancient beast has taken a poisonous shit in your heart? And it festers slow and old and mundane, like the approach of a glacier from a hilltop?

My dental hygienist invited me to help him kill/dress/butcher his cow and hog this fall. I said yes, he writ his address and phone number, but I don't even care. What's wrong with me?

Do you await the borderline where self-hatred finally liberates?