yo
i mean
i want to stay home
gnashing on percy pigs on my bed
and getting sticky fingers
because i'm not really eating
but sucking on em like somebody's watching me
and maybe shoving my sugar digits
down into my incomprehensibly neon underoos
twisting the thought of pretty boys who call me daddy all up in a tight knot in my tum

yo
i mean
caaaaaalllll meeeeeee
let's dress up in Lisa Frank and silk and listen to Robitussin dreams aired on the radio from Atlanta
we'll challenge ourselves to not touching intoxicants til the sun goes down
because
as you know
days feel loveliest when you are up early
and nap in the mid afternoon to smoke your first cigarette around 4
let's play "everybody's watching" and act accordingly
HEELS, DIP-DYE, INSTAGRAM, FOOD FIGHTS, WHATEVER, DUCK LIPS
and then around 9
i'll take something
you'll take something
so we can see the whole night
when morning rolls around
let's pretend we get paid to eat breakfast
"any kind of work is drudgery"

i'm not going down with the rest of the downtrodden
so put on your candy-colored socialite suit
act accordingly

theoretically,
i want to take you to the violet hour
and make sure you don't pay
and get us shithoused on their red rum punch
launch myself at you
once we're all but drooling in the lamp low chilter world
knock you back in that stupid, ridiculous, high-backed velvet chair
knock your chair into the other stupid, ridiculous, high-backed velvet chairs
so all the people who are the sort to go to the violet hour on a saturday night
hate us
and we get kicked out and told not to come back
i hope we can still go across the road for margaritas
i hope we're bruised and maybe there's blood in my mouth
theoretically

a poignant note

i wrote some vday letters to queer prisoners as part of a nationwide thing on vday a couple weeks ago. malic was there :)

i've already gotten some new penpals from the deal.

unfortunately, i also just got one of my cards returned to me in the mail. sticker on the envelope said the letter arrived at the prison, but was rejected because it was against their rules to have anything on the outside of the envelope besides the name and number of the prisoner, and my friend had drawn some pretty + colorful hearts all over the outside.

Here's why I can't leave Chicago.

Lake Michigan is my o(w)nly site for prayer
July August
my frenzied festival of religious ecstasy
water warm enough to wade into
and let slip
murmured, stored up slights
at night
the edge of the world seeming
the land dropping off
and me far enough out
that I see no one

and the things I speak to the lake
it holds
today I beg
to be strong
not because I have learned not to get hurt
but because I am simply strength
and I apologize
the cigarette smoke the only burnt offering I can produce

long walk there
long walk home
bearing the penance of walking alone in the dark
bearing the heavy looks from those not alone
bearing the lashes of concrete on my bare feet

Lake Michigan holding me
and all my whispered promises
vows dropped in its terrible depths

and if I could I would drink the whole lake down
but the summer storms
have pushed the river beyond its boundaries
and shit has washed up in my temple
my eyes swell with bacteria every time I put my head in
but I can't leave
because the lake knows everything about me

a letter to the police

dear fort morgan county police force & jail,

fuck you.
i won't deign to thank you for releasing donte today. fuck you for your long-winded bureaucratic oppression, your institutionalized racial and sexual profiling, and for locking up my friend.
this world might be safer and happier if you quit, closed down, and went home to your families and friends and acted like real, compassionate human beings.
oh, and fuck you to police in general for gathering en masse on my doorstep to "protect" east hyde park from black kids hanging out on the stoops. fuck you. we don't need your "protection" or your fearmongering.

yours, with relief and continuing anger,
eliot

the beginning of a thought

all of my friends are getting furuncles...i think this might mean something.

The furuncle may begin as a tender, pinkish-red, swollen nodule but ultimately feel like a water-filled balloon. It:

• Is usually pea-sized, but may be as large as a golf ball
• May develop white or yellow centers (pustules)
• May join with another furuncle or spread to other skin areas
• May grow rapidly
• May weep, ooze, crust

sensitivity training 101 - on casinos and their food courts

tonight i walked into a casino
looking for the "food court"
and found myself somewhere between the cracks--
it's 2 am and people are lounging in their businesswear and fuck
i'm white but dirty-scruffy, people stare but don't question, and i'm
friendly-fullofaffinity towards the people sweeping, cleaning, mopping, serving
(i asked, "do you like working here?"
and one woman said, "it's okay." and smiled strangely)
or maybe i was the strange one--
oversized dad-coat and bleachedpants, suspenders, my anarchy-democracy sneakers,
hood up,
i closed my eyes to walk through the lines and lines of moneygames,
people sitting like watching TV but playing for high stakes,
what a different kind of "limits" than the spheres
i usually like to touch.

anyway,
i bumped into people and things,
trying to avoid visual overstimulation,
and cause i was white they let me go everywhere, the manager
doublechecked the miso drypowder to see if it was veg
and apologized about the fish stock
and i apologized back to the chinese woman working there
because i felt out of place, guilty, kind of haunted.
"sorry" when my habits of forming chains of association mean that
oh wait i can't eat ANYTHING here and now i'm just picky and you're sorry
so let's cut it all short and i'm sorry.
it's not an apology, i'm just sick of you working here and me eating this shit and the world spinning a speed set by the clanking of change (into the casino owner's pocket at the end of the day, not that fisherman whose fish became dry stock became a little powdered packetbag but don't worry "it's japanese" you just haven't heard of it)

the feeling stuck with me on the bus back to white rock,
just sad,
not enough consumer,
not quite autonomous,
not american, not canadian, and yeah i'm thrilled with my nomadic mentality except it's hard to always be thrilled with being an outsider when most people are still eating up the global-capitalist-nationalist lies we're all told to swallow for our own good,
so i'm left as nothing but a sketch kid in his dad's big jacket
(perfect for liberation, i thought! but who knows about these canadian liquor depots...)

generally, before that,
my night was okay,
a fabulous rendezvous with cecile at a bar called "lolita's" on davie (gay) street,
warm family times.
but my life, built to be better and better for me and the world,
makes me so sensitive to all this BULLshit and oily inorganic faux-"mediterranean" pizza and miso soup from a dried package and fish stock and plastic spoons and styrofoam and teriyaki-who-knows-what and somethings masquerading as vegetables
and i just want to cook for myself, just want some autonomy, just wanna know
where everything comes from and feel good about everything in my body
but at 2 a.m. in vancouver stuck at the bridgeport skytrain-station-slash-casino,
life sometimes gets complicated
+ watearfalls (not cachoeiras, this is a different breed i tell you)
+ demographically oriented marketing
+ dreams of a better life but you know, i think you're not gonna find it here
and i'm pretty sure i'm heading in the right direction for me but sometimes it makes life a little hard to take.

finally back here,
after the taxi driver who rescued me offered me red-white-blue wine and asked
"you don't like girls? you don't like boys? who are you?"
with his arm creeping round my shoulder onto my thigh and oh oh oh please just get me to marine street)

missing the 24 hour plays, buddies, festivities, celebration,
queer love,
hugs,
karma,
spontanaeity,
lentils,
fabrications of autonomy,
fabric of reality,
lots of things lacking&surfeiting tonight. looking forward to coming home tomorrow.

and casinos suck for reasons! now you know!