ALL of Me-You: pdf | html
Contents
The Kama Sutra,
I don't have time for that bullshit
and I don't need a fortune teller to tell me
I'm going to get drunk and do something mean.
I'll tell you what: God
is way fond of the buddy-system,
your mother looks at me like I'm a cat,
and we won't be back, so let's be unrealistic.
Last night, a woman said to me, Chad,
I feel a restraining order coming on.
I deleted the idea.
Secretly, I was an olive.
pg. 3
Dear Sue,
seeing as I have the largest antenna this side of Fremont,
you shouldn't be surprised when I tell you that
yesterday I saw you interviewed on the South Bend evening news
or that I got mad when I heard you say
you'd never felt anything like the heat we're having.
Remember that night you wore your nurse's outfit for me—
I had to cool you with a fan and some cold Pepsi bottles after.
It was good anyway, remembering, and seeing you, if only on the screen,
though I sure as hell didn't like the looks of that guy next to you.
I'm writing this on a Tuesday.
Tomorrow I move west.
If you ever come home, you can have the microwave, the toaster oven,
and my new radio. I leave this note to that effect.
pg. 4
Low red star
above
parking lot
Patio-seated
Chad, sad
as Chad's been
ages and ages
wants bad
blue skirted
waitress Probably
not going to happen
Moon pale jade
In wind
howls
pg. 5
Dad tells the story about how
when he was my age he was so poor
he had to eat soup, only soup.
That's most of the story. This is the moral of it:
now he roasts his own peppers
to make a special mayonnaise.
That's what's great about America, he says,
mayo and capitalism. I think it's bullshit,
the hardship myth; I'd be happy
never having to worry a nickel
my whole life. Dad says I'm lazy,
says I'll have to get a paying job soon.
Says look at the sixties, in the long run
almost every goddamn hippie went bourge—
pg. 6
The old Super Deluxe Excellence refrigerator
makes metal breathing whirrs
every 12 to 15 minutes on the porch.
It's a mini fridge; been out here
25 years, landlady says, still works.
Inside 10 cans of an old, strange beer
wait cold and shut, and so I ask, how many hands,
would you guess have been in that fridge
besides mine and his and
what's happened to them since?
Landlady says she doesn't know, won't
guess. Says someone left it, and I can have it,
if I want, when I leave, but I don't.
It's breathing again as I try not thinking of it.
pg. 7
"I like raspberry martinis.
I like peanut-butter chocolate martinis.
I don't like straight martinis.
I don't like gin martinis.
I like pumpkin martinis. I like citrus martinis.
I don't like apple martinis. I don't
like to drink blue or green things.
But I'll probably drink a blueberry martini.
Do they make those? Probably.
I called to say I like you, Chad,
like I like martinis . . . . . sometimes.
Manhattans, though, are my like
new favorite drink. Nicole
says I've been a bitch ever since."
pg. 8
It's Tuesday. The trash has been collected,
and on television is every movie
he's ever wanted to see
except one, which he's rented.
And it's cloudy out, so there's no good reason why not
to watch them all. Maybe he'll stop around 2 AM,
maybe he won't stop.
This is Chad's dream and in Chad's dream
Chad doesn't have to get up tomorrow for anything.
So he stops recycling, takes control of the dream,
starts bending others' wills so they'll do whatever.
Even personal favors aren't too much to ask.
People, this is Chad's task:
He is his couch's chosen dreamer.
pg. 9
Of
the various
poorly fastened
cylindrical objects that
could fly back off the bed of
a pick-up truck or eighteen-
wheeler I would
prefer to
die
by
tree.
pg. 10
I am in my apartment when I smell this
smell and it's not a
winter-in-Fremont
smell anymore; it's a
first-whiff-of-spring-
smell, which gives me a stomach-ache,
the one I usually get between
ends and starts.
Maybe I should get married.
Maybe then I'd stop
dreaming of other bodies,
stop waking to feel
where on my own body
her arm might rest.
pg. 11
Recreated, the Civil War seems wussier than Gandhi—
fat-ass Soldiers with their sculpted beards,
gun smoke mixed with whiffs of cotton candy.
Appleseed has a fenced-off gravestone here,
but I bet if he were alive today, we'd
throw him in a mental institution,
give him his hat-slash-pot to play with
and some courtyard lot to plant his seeds.
Even my Dad agrees with me on this—
America's been bureaucratized to piss.
There's no room left for future Johnnies
and no convincing these guys recreating war
to recreate what we really miss: orchards—
fat men, arms up, mimicking orderly trees.
pg. 12
So what if I feel good for being quiet
as the road I barely notice
I'm so used to it
shuttles by in the same swath my
headlights make over and over. You,
in the West with your mountains, canyons, and gorges,
it might unnerve you to imagine driving hours without
stories made of curve and slope, but for me
and these sleepers with their
open-mouthed faces slack
taut like stretched cloth
sameness is preferable
as no one will be jolted
and the charge made by the bodies of these three people
makes my van's blue-lit interior
holy as a sauna
built above miles of ice.
pg. 13
The first night I held my liquor
better than he did, we were
among Sue's and my new church friends,
but where I had high hopes they'd
think as high of him as I did
he'd no notions of impressing them.
With spurted breath, his balls
hung purposely out his fly,
he told them they were the kind
MADE THIS COUNTRY GODLESS WITH LAWS
then stood back, dared them to look.
Gabe: a brilliant, unschooled fuck
he is. I looked at him.
His hung like any man's did.
pg. 14
Branch County is gray and you live there,
but to the south over the soy field you see
Steuben County's in sunshine.
You also see the line where gray meets sun and that
you come out on the wrong side.
It's like the one
where there's one, gray cloud above some poor guy's head
but actually above you is a storm system
spreading 600 miles north and into Canada.
You think it is, and it might be, but it's probably not
after you. When you live under the jet stream,
storms happen. But god,
if the straight edge-line you see of the storm
doesn't make you feel like you're a cocaine crumb
scraped across a mirror by someone's credit card.
Think of it, that crumb,
born far from his Cocoa brood,
alone, and worse, packed close with others like him
then sent away, ending up
prostrate on a dark surface below some human,
you are that cocaine. Everyone loves you,
the storm is pulling you to Canada or worse,
and when it turns red over your spot on the Doppler screen
a tornado will suck you up and drop you.
Steuben County's in sunshine. Where
is your lover, your warm food?
The line's invisible, but you feel it.
Branch County's hell because you're there.
pg. 15
***
Life is good, Sue. I don't say that enough.
The carpet I installed last year hides every possible stain,
which includes: cigarette ash, marinara, the goop
from a lava lamp, blood, other secretions
I won't speak of, and of course
pomegranate juice. Right now this woman
is singing from my stereo
some low pitched song about a dog,
which must be working in the same way as the carpet
seeing as it makes me feel ok being totally alone.
Sue, everything flattens,
when I'm in this sort of mood. I flatten. I think
who the hell am I? but in a good way.
pg. 17
Today I caught glints of predator
in Sue's little Shih Tzu's eyes
as it was barking at it's food,
the only thing in this world it's not afraid of.
Poor Annie, needy, smelly, nervous,
always shitting where you shouldn't,
you are a lesson
in how to make no one love you.
Today as I watched you take a mouthful of dog food,
drop it on the carpet, bark at the mound, then
gobble it up, I thought
you must be the most likely dog in this county
to be left deep in the woods.
Later though, when I saw Sue laugh,
then clean up the mush you left, it made more sense:
Sue loves things best that nobody else loves.
pg. 18
The green, leather, comfortable but hideous chair in front of my TV
reclines automatically when it's hit by the force of My Butt.
I've sat my butt on many chairs, people, and objects
and always— the equal return of the force of My Butt.
That they come up to meet me, these forces, and are rarely overcome,
means the world is shaped by the force of My Butt,
but not without casualties: 3 lawn chairs, one director's, one ironic
sculpture of a chair—each lost to the force of Chad's Butt.
pg. 19
Canada is a shame, a weathered history
of weather and I
am its dubitable son-in-law,
its rippled waters of—
The message the birds
don't know they are sending
has been sent to me
by the sky they are sending it from—
the sky streaked by jet clouds, bordered
by horizons of gray, the color.
Canada, I see you are gathering your fowl again.
They keep shitting on my lawn.
Soon I'll knock on the windows really loud
and scare them back north where they belong.
pg. 20
Secretly submissive Chad meets alcoholic
Sue who likes to diddle herself
in the movie theatre. The two fuck,
fall in love, move in together, start
hating each other privately, break up.
Sue goes to South Bend, gets citified.
Chad wants to gently rip all the heads
off the dolls she left, but instead
goes to the city, mortifies himself
enough to get Sue to come back home, which she does
on the condition Chad give her foot rubs
every night the rest of their god-damned lives.
Chad could give two shits; her back, he's happy
as a foot fetishist dog with a sock to play with.
pg. 21
I'm looking forward to the future though it may require great change.
For instance, probably I won't be spending Sundays
out at the sand bar partying with Shane and Mike, and
not often will I be twenty feet from a speed boat full of teenagers
getting drunk in daylight for the first time, though, to be clear,
I see little wrong in either case except for some law-breaking.
All summer I've been convincing myself all businessmen
do is construct horoscopes and, like good psychics, the best
master early the difference between likely and probable.
Likely the teens remember this day by
combination cigarette and lake smell,
by warm Budweiser —
Like a horrible
synchronized children's choir, the reeds
lining the nearest shore sway and bop.
pg. 22
Sometimes
from a distance
when the shadow's right
my body in the mirror looks good.
Like the men in magazines,
I think: Cut,
ribs showing; abs
like a bar code—
But then each time I walk
closer to the mirror and light
that body
disappears to mine:
ribs slight hints
above my cylinder gut.
pg. 23
O! How fuckin' wonderful it is to sit
outdoors and smoke, spit
through my teeth onto the grass,
how fuckin' beautiful to flick my butt onto the path
then go inside, walk to the pot
to piss, listen and like listening
as the piss stream hits, rings
out from the toilet water, hissing hot.
If I'm gross in praising this and not some woman or the sun
so is God for making me love
spittin' and pissin' and cussin' and smokin'.
Last week I fought the wall and the wall won;
I thought my own strength was enough.
I type with my left cause my right hand's broken.
pg. 24
The other night my buddy Gabe belched
real loud after chugging his beer and said
put that in your book.
I told him I would, so here it is: EHHHGHGRHGKRHGKRRHRGHGRRK,
which is not really the burp, more a terrible transcription—
but one I think he'll be ok with. When the burp occurred,
we were playing my favorite drinking game, Me-You,
which you play with a friend right before going to the bars
by taking turns chugging a can of beer until it's gone.
It sounds stupid, I know, but the game has nuances—
Say Gabe's already had too much, I'll drink most of it.
Or if I had a bad week, and Gabe knows I need to get real,
real drunk, he'll take a sip, give it back and say ‘you don't need her,'
though he knows I do, knows damn well.
pg. 25
I lay on the sofa
and on the sofa
I was not dying,
nor was I earlier, or,
I am,
but only in the way Sue refers to
when I get all funereal —
her eyes rolling,
"We're all dying."-
pg. 26
Poems in this volume have appeared (in slightly different iterations) in cream city review and Faultline.
pg. 27