the lifecycle of the botfly

at the groupon offices
i really mean the pits
today, last day of february 2013
the grunt babysitter calls a meeting
AN EMERGENCY MEETING
it has nothing to do
with the very public firing
of their CEO
who has spun poor first quarter earnings into a tale of love

in the pits
he zips me a message
"this is too real
NO ONE IS SAYING ANYTHING
you'd literally never know"
i'm snorting under my breathe
as i try to sort out over the phone
what the hell is wrong with the copier

if i move to austin, texas
and join a book group
to read kropotkin
this is what i will remember
when i say, you can't kill a thing without a head

to the health of COD: the future of American journalism

rod stewart croons twice at the drop of a dollar
you gotta love a cop bar sporting mob movie posters
lower order yuppies smoking inside (last of its kind)
snow drifts on the industrial corridor, a pitted carpet

she shouts up to the fashionable lofts
WE ARE TRYING
TO HAVE
A CIVILIZATION HERE
--you are not helping
holds up deuces for the honking driver
ice cools the place where the tears have dried

how do the spaniards even poop?

their entire diet is salted meat and bread and cheese and olives

fields of heather and a museum that induces vertigo

but oranges with hard, impressive navels

everybody gets to slow dance with the girl
wrist resting on chests, a light hand hold
once before she goes
the eastern seaboard? the east coast? you wouldn't turn 52 grand down either
gets to have dinner with her
she preaches the same sermon to all of us

the city should have been big enough for all of us
it should have been enough


the third coast becomes a lakeside villa, a neverland
i'm carding her hair, i'm touching her back
i'm proud, you're beautiful, you'll be great, buy yourself so many leather goods with all that money they're throwing at you, come see me, come see me. i know you have to go, yeah you're gonna do real good.

How'd you like Django Unchained?

right, right sure

but the thing, the bit under the bridge right--

with the baseball bat and pretending to knock one out of the park

while he knocks a head in

THAT

that's violence in toto

disguised, okay

the lower order yuppies are wrapped in a tight circle

by quarter to midnight

it's frank sinatra at this point

two old polish dudes staring intently at that patterned skirt

nearer the door, nearer the bell

we're doing the same, but

you know you can cry, right?

and it all bubbles up, right out of the chest

and when e and i walk out of the bar

i'm holding her like we're walking away from a graveyard

there's a flung cigarette butt on clybourn avenue and the ground fairly sparkles at adams and monroe and if you stand on the corner of lincoln and george on a windy night the air howls through the tunnel in the telephone pole and it's the sound you might hear when the city empties out forever, along with taxi cabs still playing WBEZ and i'll expect the trucks again next week in front of my apartment to carry the crew of Chicago Fire and i'll still get on the bus in the wrong direction at Jefferson park

i rewrote the sermon

we loved it each other and it wasn't enough

ek. it's the twenty-first century, you can put your fist in an orifice you please. was anyone really ready for this?

doh. so far, i think i am more punk than anyone i have met in life. i love my whole house. i can do anything good.

teen. i know you've got a lot on your plate.

char. panch. che. sat. at. nau. das.

gyarah and barah. exploding it out of it's original context. we're really going to die in public. i mean really really. watch us die. please come watch us die and watch us take off our clothes.

terah. lucky knee socks. you know god isn't real, right? you know you can work out and work out and work out and get swole and still be the snaggle-toothed, skinny-minny loser you were in college. unlucky knee socks. sorry my feet stink.

ever i saw a face

some remembrances are no longer useful
slide down the back road to the rock on the cul-de-sac's edge
the dirt path forking around both sides
i always used to think the side i chose gave the day its shape
up through the trees and near the reindeer farm
how i would get spit out onto pavement again
right next to your house
staying on streets would have stretched the journey out by miles
i remember how

or a list of spots for roof access
where i could take kissers or
those whose youth i wished to crow
and
earlier
chants of victory poolside
the order in which she'd pick up our vegetables
the hot touch of plastic seats
the scantron's roving eye

small deaths refusing to be integrated
you looks so young - i've been born so many times
after the incidents down by the back board and the lunch table
chain-link passageways and alleys turned driveways
the hard champagne sun

why the title, i wonder
and the paintings chosen for the cover
though the hell inside is not so simple as Moreau
why did i allow a used bookstore to sell it to me for $21
in front of my mother
when it was already warped at the corner
like someone dipped in the tub
when it traveled across the ocean
sold to the same someone for 20 pounds
at gatwick or heathrow

(but that's modern loving, isn't it?
reading the same book, months apart
in different cities, on similarly piss stained trains
ice and salt drawing mandelbrots on our boots
that's what left to us)

in the smell at the bottom of the washing machine
cold basement stone and wet sand and mold
in underwear hardened with blood
i know there's a religion amongst those pages
if you were so inclined
(who else but a prophet can know that much about so many people?)
a calendar for doom, a new gravity of suffering
support documents for the work of Carlton Pearson
the long ream of research for the thesis of Melancholia
and it's in my hands to help me get right with god

but more truthfully,
it's that our lives glance off each other here too
if only we could see the whole a little better
maybe we sense that there could be sense
that there's a brain in every department
or at least a set of lungs
but kick in the shins, kick in the teeth, kick in the nuts
it's no good to think
we've done anything more than create a new Nature
and god bless you, but you don't find faces behind storms