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

DADZ KLUBB (NE1 CAN JOIN)

i don't want to think about my dad
as he sits alone in that house in connecticut
burning old receipts
boxes of them
when he doesn't know why he kept them in the first place
and calling me
to ask if i want to keep my dusty, water-warped artwork from third grade
when my brother doesn't come home much
and sleeps through most of thanksgiving day
in the guest room downstairs
because he doesn't want dad to know how late he got in
the landing creaks on the way up

how often does my dad call my grandparents
who are dying an ocean away
and i don't want to think
how bitter bitter bitter my granddad sounds
when he talks about the electricity board
and never talks about why he changed our family name

if the bank forecloses on a man's house
and his wife leaves him finally
and he doesn't have a job
and his son gets ready to go off to college
and his little girl is a grown up who can't remember to phone home
like she's trying to look at the sun
but instead has to look to the side of it
then
what is a man?

"i stopped paying the mortgage last august"
he says in july
i'm screaming
"why didn't you say anything? why do you never say?"
"you're old man owes 60 thou for your schooling"
"there are so many times you could have told me"
but he's the first person i call a month later
to say
"i'm nothing nothing nothing at all"
he knows
"people have been telling you what do to do you whole life"
at 22 minutes
i think it's the longest conversation we've ever had

i hope that house was fucking worth it, you ass

PRE-ASPIRATION INSTRUCTIONS

4. Please try to have a bowel movement the evening before or the morning of your procedure.



...and here I fail. I only have 7 hours left to prove myself.

a thousand miles wrapped up in blankets

i slept so late today, droppeddripped into a dreamworld that wouldn't let me go.
at first i was at a relative's house with my sister. there were a lot of people ("relatives") i'd never seen before and the ones with recognizable faces also seemed like strangers. i think i watched porn with someone who claimed to be my cousin.
then we were in this hotelplace and we had to prepare a defense. we got into this court-like place and i was woefully unprepared, had forgotten all of my pieces of paper. i had a hard time stating my name. the purpose of the "trial" was unclear (it could have been a conference) but my sister and i were called upon to Do Something. luckily instead of a defense we turned off the lights and did a performance. i think we won.
back to the hotel, now in the suburbs in the middle of nowhere: i stole some runts and other candy from a grocery store with an unguarded back door (silly silly) and shared with my sister and some other dreamfriends i had met earlier that night. (one, for instance, had long long brown hair and a big black hat and wore all black.) we ate them in the hotel.
later becci and i were hanging out in the garden and i think i dreamt of trellises that grew high high and huge huge collard greens sprouts, racing the sunflowers towards the sky.

anyway i had like 13 hours of adventures in dreamworld. i wish dreams weren't so compelling. sort of. or just that i could wake up in the morning...this "rainforest" sound produced by my cellphone kept creeping into my dream and was very unwelcome.

also i am excited for leli's return!