Generation Why?

2012-01-07T19:53:00.003-05:00

Decent Deceit

Death has a habit

of making Atheists

feel like assholes,

how ugly rationality

can seem in the face

of such beautiful

and compassionate

lies. It's true what

they say, there are

no Atheists in foxholes

just a lot of scared people

desperate enough to believe

in anything. And the glaring

silence that follows. Toe tags

freshly tied around our tongues.

This is uncomfortable. So we

provide comfort. We provide

the kindness of fiction,

the convenience of magic,

our most decent deceit.

And I wish I could be a liar

and not know any better

at times like these. I wish

that my hands were conduits

for prayers, but they are simply

for holding. Most days I do my best

to avoid God, but we always seem

to run into each other at funerals,

where it's never appropriate

to ask the important questions:

Where were you when we

needed you? Death's constant

accomplice, always showing up

after the fact, like some transparent

Clark Kent. And I'm the character

that knows his secret but no one

wants to hear it, so I embrace

the silence, able to offer nothing

but a hand to hold. I may be

a bad person, but it's not because

I don't believe in God. It's because

I care more about the truth

than I should about people, can't

muster a mythical afterlife, provide

odds on whether or not someone is

actually in a better place, not even

a nice uplifting anecdote. I'm not

good at this, not equipped to sooth

and bandage this gaping wound,

can’t even dress it up in Sunday

finest so we can lay it finally to rest.

All I can say is that I’m sorry, for more

things than you can possibly know.

But mainly because I am still here

and I have nothing more to offer,

and I want so badly to be that liar

capable of giving you everything

you deserve, our most beautiful

and magical and kind and decent

deceit.

2011-12-09T18:44:00.002-05:00

Letter to My Unborn Child

The prescription for my DNA

dispensed over a counter

in pills that dissolve bitter like hope,

I fear that I will leave you drugged,

without the health care needed to pay the bills,

that the cost of your youth will be paid in dreams,

your regrets held in a drawer with receipts

that register in cold eyes

the price you have paid for adulthood.

I fear blood infected by angels and devils,

the tug-of-war of unrelenting opponents that pull upon your veins.

I fear that these childhood friends will abandon you

after kissing your cradles with the promise of hope

that you will wake up with my DNA caught in your throat,

screaming that you never asked to be born in the first place

that you will have no need to face a world

that so desperately needs to meet you,

sleeping on stranger’s couches instead of at home,

tempting fate like newly formed fingers

cradling the singed wicks of firecrackers.

I fear that my lessons in living

will be taught in a dialect

of psycho-babble and coping mechanisms:

Step 1- breathe into a paper bag

of malt liquor

Step 2- exhale the remains

of an unfinished cigarette

Step 3- find a bed messy enough not to notice

when you come

and when you go

I fear that my love for you won’t be enough

to stave off my addictions, that my love for you

won’t be enough to prevent your succumbing to your own,

I fear buds stored like bullets in chambers of pipes

the romance of a polluted city street you see in my eyes,

noses powdered with the coked-up rhythm of a line dance,

veins that listen to needles,

spinning tracks to the beat of a man who plays the dirty spoons,

I fear the alleyways, the filthy bathrooms that will constantly call your name,

the sleepless nights, the shivering, the wondering

where you will sleep tomorrow,

the darkness of nights spent waiting for the dawn.

I fear that you, my children will consume women like narcotic,

men like—me, swallowing a horizon like a barbiturate

to lull a morning soul to sleep,

coffee syntax dribbling over teeth

stained the color of insomnia

when sunlight through the window

tastes like a mint on your pillow

when the six a.m. news sounds like a lullaby

and the prospect of dreams

feels better then sex.

I fear that you,

my children, will fall prey to the insanity of normalcy

that keeps my pen from moving, that you will spend

your entire life striving to be perfect, otherwise

you will be perfect,

I fear a time

when lovers will seem stranger than strangers

when the loneliness of a crowd will echo louder

than an empty room.

I fear that the day will come—

the shattering of a glass

that was once half full

when God is not enough,

and you have had enough, a day

when you measure your patience in calibers,

contemplating the hard comfort of a bullet,

the soft pillow of exploded expectations, feathers

falling to the floor in time-lapsed frames

that some call days. I know this place too well.

In this place your nights battle your mornings,

warning signs dig into punctured arms and wrists

are scratched like a suicide note on a prison wall,

where the letters haphazardly prescribed onto bottles

can fill a future like a medicine cabinet.

and I know this place too well.

When I say that I fear bringing children into a world like this,

I often wonder if I don’t mean a world where I am your father.

2011-11-25T12:57:00.002-05:00

Miranda

The first time that I had her

on her father’s bed

she feared that I would break her

like an egg, cracked and poured

and left only a shell.

I feared that I would break her,

like water. The look in her eyes rippling

with the distant threat of flood,

and all that I could offer to dike her dam

to calm those salty waters threatening to wash

over her wounds, was a backwashed tide

of carefully prescribed prayers. The kind

that teenage boys are so adept at piecing together.

Each fingered rosary crashing from my lip like sedative.

Each thrusting hallelujah of I love you threatening to collapse

those fragile walls, causing them to crumble in upon themselves,

like an overly eager Joshua fumbling with my trumpet.

My instrumental played over the bass line of her

rhythmic grunt. Hearing in those moans,

the prehistoric equivalent of what the word delicate

would one day become. This Pentecostal call and response

filling the bedroom like one of those recordings of waves crashing.

This droning consistency’s lull the next best thing to absence,

to silence, to the wont of nothing. My mouth reeking

of the sea’s salty spray. White noise soothing

what I had been taught would be the pain of this sex.

This clumsy unfolding. This tattered origami slowly ripped apart

as it folds back upon itself, as it’s worn too thin and inevitably torn

This lamb led to slaughter by one of her own. This lamb led to slaughter

by a butcher cloaked in wool. Her father’s black light

illuminated the room like a crime scene. Shocked condom

spectators mouthed their silent disbelief. The sirens

revolving in her eyes. The cross trembling on the bedpost. We knew

that once we acquired a taste for this we could never go back. We knew

that it was only our blind unwillingness to look away

that kept this from being a crime. We knew

that there is only the thinnest of lines

between the most tender of sacraments

and double homicide. We knew

that her father would not soon

be home.

2011-11-19T15:54:00.002-05:00

The Apple and The Fall

The first time we met

I knew you were a sadist.

It was the way the magnifying glass of your gaze

burnt the wings off of the butterflies in my stomach.

I can’t blame you for the times

when your kiss tastes like anesthetic

or myself for expecting this sacrament

to be flavored any differently.

At 15, when my anti-depressants

started to work I reported it to my doctor

as a side effect. I’ve never felt

comfortable with what some people call happiness,

but get giddy and nostalgic

recollecting my own self-destruction,

name dropping overdoses

and quoting my favorite suicide notes verbatim.

I’ve played Russian roulette with a future full of empties

and prayed that no one would see through the bluff—

pulled the trigger like some B-movie version of God

who’s already read the script, but doesn’t know

that his script is written into someone else’s.

I’ve pushed the hands of time

thinking they might

start pushing back.

Until I realized

that I was the clock—

a grave face covered in dirt, two clean hands

sifting through stolen time I never thought I’d live

long enough to serve. Like a criminal

who never expected to get caught,

I thought I was immune to gravity,

growing sicker by the day,

deliriously babbling

about the apple and the fall.

Somewhere outside

of Eden I realized that

if freedom is just another word

for nothing left to lose, then I am a slave

to a smile, my mouth shackled

to the forecast of your mood,

too often weathering each kiss

like small talk on a gorgeous day,

preoccupied with a phantom

limb I never lost. The invisible man

better watch his back

because organ donors are scarce,

death travels light, and if I can find him

before he finds me I’m plotting

to steal away his scythe, hack off an arm, and see

if that can finally teach me how to hold you.

I’ve been drinking all night,

liquoring up this gorgeous, confused

moment of uncertainty, wondering

if the three of us can ever fit in the same bed.

Once upon-a-times begin a story

I’m not ready to tell. Every story begins

a Happily-ever-after. I’ve since come

to know you too well, can smell the non-fiction

on your breath. You’ve got a jaw line

like a plotline drawn by M.C. Escher

a mouth full of stairs

that lead to nowhere.

I’ve got a fear of heights, so maybe

we can meet in the middle. I’m starting

to fall for you. The ink’s starting to smear

onto to the sheets, I can’t sleep, so I’m up

watching some late night B-Movie,

which, come morning, will turn out to be a dream.

In the dream,

you’re a star,

shining through a magnifying glass

burning the wings off of the butterflies

in my stomach, so if I fall asleep, or start to think

that this is just a dream, just pinch me as hard as you can.

I promise I’ll try to wake up. Because the way

you make me hurt

feels good.

2011-11-02T20:56:00.001-04:00

Love’s Ugly Secret

Real love is only found

in someone who accepts

that which we find least

acceptable in ourselves.

How Katie can convince Carl

that the finger on the nape of her neck

is not the same as the finger that pulled

the trigger during the war.

How Bridget can convince Kenny

that he looks nothing like his father.

How Frank can convince Lauren

that it wasn’t her fault.

How Jessica can convince Charles

that she can’t even see his scars.

How Melanie can convince Dave

that his nose gives him character.

How Henry can convince Ann

that her wrinkles are just the echo

left in the wake of her booming smile.

How Justin can convince Lila

That that thing she likes to do in bed

isn’t really that weird at all.

How Dave supported Sarah’s decision

to have another child, the word “another”

a ghost that will always linger in the room.

How Matt tells Kristen that she looks better

without makeup, and she knows that he means it.

How Jason can hold Jennifer in a way

that makes being held feel more like being held

and less like being trapped.

How Stephanie knows she talks too much

and Billy can never get enough.

How Emily thinks she has a fat ass

and Ryan thinks…she has a fat ass.

How a childhood insult

can become a pet name.

How a single kiss can silence the doubt.

How a single word can make it all alright.

Because there is no terror

in the darkness once shared.

Because the face in the mirror

may never be as beautiful to you

as it is to them, but sometimes

just knowing that someone

can love it

makes enough of it

right enough.

Real love

the kind that lasts

is only found in someone

who knows exactly and precisely

who you are

and loves you

in spite of it.

2011-10-29T20:49:00.001-04:00

A Proposal

I thought I had perfected

the one night stand

learned to celebrate

fifteen minute anniversaries

inconsequential ramblings

and first fights

we'll never

be lucky enough

to share with one another

our most articulate love letters
spelled out into grunts

the length of our relationship

counted in drinks

blurry minutes measured

into shot glasses

151 proofs to convince us

why we’re perfect for each other

by the time the fifth is gone

I know your life story

and we're contemplating

naming our first born child

Jaegermeister

three drinks later

and I'm carrying you

across the bathroom floor

like it's a honeymoon suite

by last call we’ve left the stall

dripping in nostalgia

savoring each other's flashbacks

flossing away the last of our innocence

spinal cords laced between our teeth.

Our relationship is a support group

for people who want to quit the support group.

The only way to quit

is to have another relapse,

and I've gone on so many blind dates with you

I'm legally handicapped

so when I roll over and introduce myself to you

for the fiftieth time

consider it force of habit

I’m an unrepentant addict

but I do believe in safe sex

so I’m going to ask you to leave

before I start giving you reasons

to hate me

before you start storing cutlery

in the bedroom

start watching the way

even our reflection cringes

in the knives on the nightstand.

because even with a one night stand

you can wake up in the morning

and find your heart

in pieces.

2011-10-29T16:03:00.000-04:00

Scars like Rosaries

I drank too much last night.

This morning’s orange juice barely managed
to twist a stiff screwdriver into my veins.

Crucifixions like these run through my family—

transubstantiate our blood into wine

tuck my mother into bed

shepherd fathers into early graves.

My church is a slow suicide.

It’s never hard to find converts.

I drink religiously.

People have a way of respecting

that kind of devotion.

At fifteen I made my first communion—

looted a liquor cabinet

found God in an overdose

woke up to the baptism of an IV drip

realized that not all messiahs

are born that way.

To this day
I don’t bother with apostles

don’t bother with virgins or whores

just a crown of thorns and a bed of nails.

When I feel like being betrayed

I deny myself three times,
before thrice crows the cock.

In this church

hangovers are purgatory

heaven is a blackout

hell is a southern Sunday morning

and rehab is a four letter word.

Yesterday was the first day of lent—

I decided to go on a bender

for forty days and forty nights.

This morning I woke up
with the hair of the dog on my breath.

I wish that this was a metaphor

but the taste is unmistakable.

I tell myself that it could be worse.

But hindsight is wearing my clothes

and smoking a cigarette,

and there is no birth control for our regrets,
so we abort our one night stands

and pray for forgiveness.

At this altar

at this bar we patron

saints vow to stay alive

or die trying, because saints

are the sinners who keep on going.

We offer these toasts as prayers—

una Corona para los muertos

swallow beer and pretzel Eucharist

the psalms of a jukebox choir

pilgrimages that lead from bar to bar

we wear our scars like rosaries

on knees we nightly pray.

This is our religion of crucifixion—

drowning the stigmata

of our wet wounded mouths.

—M.C. Siegel

2011-10-22T21:50:00.000-04:00

Balancing the Equation

“Wreck” and “destroy”

are the most romantic words that I can think of.

The word “dominate”

sounds like a honeymoon suite

an unforgettable night

a bill we’ll never

be able to pay.

The way we leave each other with nothing

makes Buddhist monks jealous,

is like hitting nirvana

until it bleeds,

like balancing an equation

on our backs,

branding our subtraction

onto every trembling scar.

I need to be solved with a backhand

and I can’t do this without you.

So when I ask you to tie the knot—

it’s probably not what you think.

I don’t mind getting tied down with a wife—

but she may not be into that kind of thing.

I’ve given fair warning:

Candlelit dinners

will rarely come without ulterior motives,

roses

without provocations to use them,

the dance of wax and thorns

across my back

should be forbidden,

a constant accessory

to what inevitably follows.

Our foreplay is a hate crime.

We get off on being punished.

And I know that this isn’t healthy—

but neither is chemotherapy.

If we were a tumor

we would be malignant but operable.

We would be a rusty scalpel

fidgeting in the waiting room

dissecting the remains

of sawed off fantasies

that just couldn’t do the trick.

The metastasized kick

blowing sweet

“you’ll never be anythings”

into our ears.

Our elementary school teachers

pounding away

on the other side door

brandishing warrants

that come in the form

of our 3^rd grade love letters

armed with our innocence.

My conscience knocks back,

my sweat pops its head out

from underneath these covers of skin

stumbles onto the ridge of my chest

searching for a place

to take cover.

I struggle to breathe

under the weight of your shadow.

Once I cradled the possibility of us

like the dark secret

you were going to name after me.

You wanted to love my every accident,

and I hated you enough to love you for it.

Now the only thing we need an excuse for

is the way that every apology leads into a relapse.

Because a slap doesn’t always bring you to your senses.

—M.C. Siegel

2011-10-19T21:44:00.000-04:00

The Long Commute

My inferiority complex

is far too simple—

I don’t deserve you

know that I’ll eye any woman

capable of loving me

like an empty seat

in a crowded subway car

wondering what

could possibly

be wrong with her

still

I search for you

on crowded subway platforms

our faces smeared

onto passing trains

like graffiti, scared

that I’ll deface you

and call it art

the mural of the woman

without the head

painted with a splash

of rum, and a brush

of coke, the crime scene outlined

in invisible ink, the body

that disappears the morning after

the heist the papers label an inside job

and I work the night shift

insomnia predisposes you

to these kinds of crimes:

last night a stolen dream was pawned

and my only alibi: that I was home alone

thinking of you

is like coming to a trial

with a signed confession

as my only defense

So I confess.

I’ve given

all your love letters away

to women who kiss like a snooze alarm

who screech like the 4 train

who love like kleptomaniacs

who leave like escape artists

on a good night

I can give an orgasm in my sleep

but screams alone will never

be loud enough to wake me

from my dreams

I want to wake up

to the sizzling aroma

of your tragedy

drink your tears

like freshly squeezed

orange juice, serve you

sunrises like breakfast

in bed

we’ve both spent so long waiting

only faith of sunrise

or apocalypse

to get us through the night

so when I see you

standing on that platform

I can only hope

that my breath

will be the wind

that races

through those tunnels

letting you know

when your train

has arrived.

--M.C. Siegel

2011-10-17T18:46:00.000-04:00

Ode to Cuteness

When I tell you you’re cute

you usually get upset,

tell me you wish you were beautiful.

And I tell you beautiful is a dime a dozen

and goes rotten quicker than pork

in Mecca on a hot summer day.

You tell me you wish you were more than cute

because “cute” is the kind of word even “nice” picks on,

because cute is shallower

than a redneck’s gene pool.

And I tell you that if this is your definition of cute

then you have obviously never looked in a mirror.

Because baby, you are so cute,

you make Care Bears suicidal,

make puppies neuter themselves,

make unicorns impale themselves on each other’s horns.

You make rainbows look like something

you’d find in the gutter,

fetuses crave coat hangers.

You give a newborn a midlife crisis.

You are so cute,

you turned Rainbrow-Brite to the dark side,

made all the smurfs smurf themselves because after seeing you

they didn’t feel smurfy enough.

You made Jem feel like she was less than

truly outrageous.

You are the kingpin of cute,

pushing fifty-four kilos a week of pure, uncut adorable.

The way you rock pigtails

turned the three little pigs into arsonists.

You’ve got dimples like landmines

set to detonate with a hair trigger smile.

Your brown eyes make other people’s brown eyes

look like assholes.

You make cute the most brutal four-letter word

in the English language,

the kind of word

that you can crack a tooth on,

that parents admonish their children

not to utter

fathers warning their sons of the ways that you coo pet names

like a siren, drawing men to the jagged rock

of your mouth, you’ve got a kiss like a shipwreck

and god damn you make me want to drown.

Your kind of cute is unhealthy. The human body

not adapted to handle it, my heart

swelling like an untreated infection. Last week

you smiled at me and I shattered a rib.

The occupational hazards of loving you

leaving me in desperate need of better health insurance.

You’re not as cute as a button,

you’re as cute as the buckles on a straightjacket,

as cute as the zipper on a body bag,

the stitches from the time you unlaced your wrists

the smile that sews together the frayed edges

of my mornings and my nights.

You’re the kind of cute

that will either cure me or kill me,

leave me with a mountain ridge

of splintered bone for a chest,

and on this hallowed altar

a heart that beats for you.

--M.C. Siegel

2011-10-15T16:08:00.000-04:00

2011-10-10T23:01:00.000-04:00

The Big Apple

It is the cemeteries of Queens.

Its smiling headstones.

The Hudson poking fun at the East River

over Manhattan’s shoulder.

The seductive skyline

of the Manhattan Bound Q.

It is a salty sunset at Battery Park,

the jibaro yawn of strawberry fields.

The Day-Glo dawn

of Times Square.

The t’ai chi dawn

of the parks of Queens.

The gambit of the morning’s first pawn

in Washington Square Park.

It is the steel pan of Eastern Parkway

drummed over the Talmud.

The soy-stained plantains and chicken wings of Chinese restaurants,

Indio-Cubano-Chinese joints staffed by Mexicans and Puerto Ricans.

It is piraguas, snow cones, shaved ice, raspados, frio frio, halo halo, patbingsu, and kakigori,

none of which are the same thing as Italian Ice.

It is Bootleg DVDs, $1 batteries, and the helium inflected hiccup of a clacker

clutched like a ticket stub for entrance into the American Dream.

It is the welcoming arms of Ellis Island, a city of immigrants living in a country

that has forgotten where it came from.

It is hustlers and pimps

prostituting portfolios on Wall Street.

It is guys named Country

who will never leave the city.

It is neighborhoods composed of men with names like Panama, Grenada, and Jamaica,

domino games that sound like a meeting of the United Nations.

It is the courage to oppose a war fought in our names,

marching through the ashes of our own.

It is standing in the footsteps of those that came before you,

to hear the echoes of those who have stood on this hallowed ground.

It is Whitman’s Yawp, Ginsberg’s Howl. It is “Smoke? Smoke?”

“Some change?” “Batteries?” “Newports? Newports?” “DVDs?”

It is “excuse me ladies and gentleman, I am here today selling candy bars

for my basketball team.” And, of course, everyone’s favorite remix

“I’m not here selling candy bars for my basketball team, I’m just a kid trying

to make an honest dollar instead of selling drugs or doing something bad.”

It is being in a monogamous relationship with a train, to know the difference

between the 2 and the 3, the 4 and the 5, the 1 and the 9, to ride the train

to the end of the tracks, to take the R to the E to the G to the above ground transfer

to the 2 or the 3 to make a two hour commute between Brooklyn and Queens,

to know

that you’re only moving one mile.

It is card games being played in the back rooms of Bensonhurst.

Actresses playing the same role until it’s all rehearsed.

It is knowing enough not to step

in any green puddles on Saint Patrick’s Day.

Knowing which bodegas sell what

and which ones to avoid.

It is roller disco Saturdays

in Central Park.

It is the best team in baseball….and the Mets.

It is Jackie jacking the color line out the park.

It is a borough that lost its baseball team.

A blackout where no one got hurt.

It is physically impossible graffiti tagged onto the ethereal elevations of buildings above

and darkness sprayed depths of tunnels below.

It is a foot of snow

being called a blizzard.

It is the women, the first day of summer, a calendar whose days are defined in flesh,

a daily regimen of “what ifs”, the sore neck inducing whiplash switch of a hip.

It is love triangles defined in the length of a train ride,

the downcast geometries of loneliness.

It is admiring the God Damn of the curves of the Brooklyn Bridge, wires clinging like straps

to the body of one of the city’s last monogamous pieces of sky.

It is summer’s humid breath blowing in your face,

begging for some tongue.

It is the view from Central Park, staring into the face of the surrounding city’s gap-toothed

sun-gilded adolescent grin, scaffolding like braces to shape the still awkward smile.

It is the way that you’re so….dirty.

And I kind of like that.

The way that you’re thick, full figured torso and legs of Manhattan, the bulging backside

of Brooklyn and Queens, the oversized head of the Bronx, and Staten Island….

some things

you just got to learn to love.

It is more New Yorker than American,

more borough than city, more block than borough.

It is a place where tragedies leave beauty marks, where hunger

is just another mouth to feed from this big, dirty apple, a heart pumping

blood, this city inside us, so when we die, you can bury the rest,

but you can never whittle this core from our chests.

2011-10-08T21:08:00.002-04:00

Bleeding Heart (for Rupert Murdoch)

-----------------------------------------

Calling Fox News news

is like calling a snuff film a comic romp

because you looped a laugh track over the money shot.

The difference is a snuff film makes more sense,

and the people who make it are more likable.

Watching white trash vote for conservatives

is like watching someone drink their drink

even though they already know it’s been laced

with roofies. Sometimes we’re willing to endure

a little rape if we think we’ll eventually get our own

turn at the American Dream, bent over and drooling

while a bunch of hillbillies and frat boys sit around

and nostalgically lament how much this reminds them

of the way things used to be,

when everyone knew their place,

awaiting their next command from Rupert—

the creepy guy who gives the instructions

and just likes to watch, eyes glazed over

with dollar signs. I’m not a social worker

because I like people. I’m just not nearly

as good at hating them as God fearing Christians,

constantly clamoring for war and guns.

Because it isn’t enough to brandish God

like a weapon. Sometimes you need

a semiautomatic too, gotta spread the gospel

of the second amendment because there’s nothing

Jesus would love more than the obscenely rich and guns.

God fearing folk fear literacy and logic

because otherwise they wouldn’t be God

fearing folk. Last week a study was published

showing that atheists and agnostics know more

about religion than religious people do.

That’s why they’re atheists and agnostics.

Because religious fundamentalism and Fox news

tend to appeal to the same kinds of people,

the ones afraid of shades of gray,

who like their world simple and uncomplicated

and are ready to destroy anyone or anything

who threatens to complicate it, which means

anyone or anything different from them,

and so you get witch hunts & crusades and

inquisitions and holocausts, you get human

sacrifice and Islamic Jihad because you can

convince a man to do anything if he thinks

he’s doing it in the name of God, and so

you get people willing to believe

that the world was created

in seven days and dinosaurs

are just a liberal conspiracy

along with abolition, civil

rights, suffrage, and social justice.

Only in America could a news network

become so popular convincing people

why it’s alright to be awful.

That it’s better to be racist,

xenophobic, greedy, and stupid

than it is to be educated, rational, and reasonable.

Because there isn’t anything less patriotic

than a foreign owned network

that gets rich off of turning Americans

into mindless idiots. You say bleeding heart?

I say Jesus was the original bleeding heart

and if he did come back today

you would be the first to crucify him

on air. You say bleeding heart? I say

better to have a bleeding heart than no heart at all.

I say it is foolish to take such pride in heartlessness.

I say a heart that does not bleed is no heart at all. I say

that is what hearts do. They bleed. Does yours?

--M.C. Siegel

2011-10-08T21:07:00.002-04:00

The mainstream media needs to stop depicting the protesters on Wall St. as misguided radicals. What’s radical is continuing to cling to the same discredited policies that got us into this mess in the first place and somehow expecting things to turn out differently . What’s radical are news channels masquerading as objective while they clearly push the political agendas of their corporate owners. What’s radical is continuing to celebrate the very people who got us into this mess while denigrating those with the temerity to speak out as voices of reason in an increasingly insane world. That’s radicalism. We are the alternative.

2011-10-08T21:06:00.000-04:00

Horatio Alger Lies Here

---------------------------

Each evening begins with her confession. Today her

co-worker called her incompetent. I tell her, “Maybe

it’s a nickname.” She says she wants to backhand her so hard

her baby will feel it. I’m sure there’s a nickname somewhere

in there. I’m not so sure I want to find it. I ask her

to warn me before she goes on her killing spree. She says

she can’t. Then it’d be premeditated. I wish she

was joking, but when we spend most of our time snorting

the poverty line how can you blame a girl for wanting

to go cold turkey? I massage her neck; sore from years spent

staring up at a glass ceiling covered in so many

layers of red tape, lead paint, and asbestos she doesn’t

even know what’s up there anymore. She says she feels sick

to her stomach. I tell her health insurance is not a

benefit when the only thing making you sick is your

job. I remind myself that we are all valued members

of the (fill in the blank here) family, but when you’re as

interchangeable as a smiling face snapped onto a

torso you start to understand why the assembly line

and the unemployment line look so much alike. Still, I

try to convince her why it is all worthwhile, but playing

devil’s advocate loses its allure when you wake up

to realize that you have become Lucifer’s lead counsel.

The reality is that employee of the month is

the adult equivalent of class clown only middle

management isn’t funny. The kind of reunion punch

line that no one laughs at. The other day I had some time

on my hands, and live in a country where I am afraid

one day that will be used as evidence against me. Work

is like a religion to Americans, where the

unemployed are treated like godless heathens, and still

we can’t manage to muster any sympathy for all

the Mexicans who make the daily pilgrimage to the

Mecca of our border. But we’re a civilized people,

in a great nation where we have over-educated

Ph.D.s picking up our trash. Their existence is an

unread Marxist thesis in the making. America

is a nation based on the noble ideal of equality,

and we consider it our national duty

to exploit everyone equally, regardless of race,

ethnicity, or creed. Lost jobs, child labor, and pollution

stained shorelines are so much more palatable when you slap

a cute little name like globalization on them. But

calling slavery’s illegitimate great grandchild free-

trade is like letting Toby wear a nametag with Kunta

on it. In a sign of the times, blue collars have fallen

out of style. Jobs once passed down through generations like

treasured family heirlooms are sold to the lowest

bidder, leaving behind a trail of bodies that stare

vacant and empty as abandoned factories, minds like

busted conveyor belts, citizens of a sweatshop called

America. We eat pink slips for dinner, choke on

italic and scribble, suffer in silence and sweat

quiet desperation onto brows furrowed like plows

plunging into the dirty ridge of a new day. Today

she quit her job—asked to work more hours for less pay,

asked to stay in Newark for one more day, where one day is

one day too many, tired of her bones being strip mined

for a dime on the dollar, today her smile went from

over easy to hard boiled, yoked to the yellow splatter

of survival. Today the most beautiful machine I

know abjured rust and creaked to a well lubed halt. Today her

resume is splayed across pages of pornography

posing as want ads. Tomorrow she will answer a cat

call, chase cheese through a rat race, and take her place on an

assembly line, her smiling face snapped onto a broken spine,

serving her time, on the clock, in America.

2011-10-02T21:11:00.000-04:00

Middle America

Those of us who manage to escape

never want to admit where we come from,

connoisseurs, who have seen the inside of

the slaughterhouse through the dimmed slats of

our eyes, know that we may end up the main course.

We have seen the rooms that house the bones

we swallow like stones to grind meals

in the gizzards of conscienceless throats.

Our national motto is “all you can eat.”

Ravenous appetite for our favorite foods,

national mascot already extinct. Favorite drink,

a cup of oil with a twist of blood on the rocks,

call it foreign policy for short. It’s an acquired taste.

National anthem a drunken chant of we’re number one.

We’re insatiable, jerk off to slashed prices,

The home shopping network is a snuff film,

with b-list celebrities cast as executioners,

hoods replaced with diamond studded tiaras—

we have limited time offers

on our hands.

This is a quintessentially American art form

some less refined civilizations

confuse with pornography.

Starving children out of fashion this season

unless they’re on the catwalk, emaciated

faces relegated to the realm of late night

infomercials, fates placed into the hands

of those too lazy to change the channel,

competitive eating broadcast in primetime

as sport, losers don’t get consolation prizes,

and the dead air that follows.

Jesus reinvented as a washed up reality

star on a show no one watches

except on holidays, founding fathers

fodder for America’s newest reality

sensation “Pimp My Dad”, as we

filibuster our way towards apocalypse.

National history, a shell game.

Don’t try to win, the game is rigged.

Our national pastime is indifference,

It has been conscripted,

used as hired muscle

for this century’s version

of the slave trade, where sitting on your ass

is just as deadly as brandishing an M-16.

While generic drugs capable of saving

lives are labeled Un-American,

our national pride swells

like an untreated infection.

There is a sickness in this place.

There is a resistance, but no immunity,

a vision like a mirage we all see, but don’t

all believe. Our national flower is a bomb

blooming in the desert and from where

we’re standing,

we think

it looks

beautiful.

2011-10-02T20:20:00.000-04:00

A demon from another world, sent to destroy us all.

2011-10-02T14:50:00.002-04:00

2011-10-02T01:19:00.002-04:00

This was unanimously voted on by all members of Occupy Wall Street last night, around 8pm, Sept 29. It is our first official document for release. We have three more underway, that will likely be released in the upcoming days: 1) A declaration of demands. 2) Principles of Solidarity 3) Documentation on how to form your own Direct Democracy Occupation Group. This is a living document. you can receive an official press copy of the latest version by emailing c2anycga@gmail.com.
Declaration of the Occupation of New York City
As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.
As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.
They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.
They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless nonhuman animals, and actively hide these practices.
They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.
They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.
They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.
They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
They have donated large sums of money to politicians supposed to be regulating them.
They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantive profit.
They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.
They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts.*
To the people of the world,
We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.
Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.
To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.
Join us and make your voices heard!

2011-10-01T21:43:00.000-04:00

My blog has been resurrected! Back from the dead! With everything going on down on Wall Street right now, I wanted to post this poem, which though written a while back, still seems to speak to the issues being brought up by this protest...

Manifest Destiny

I am the American Dream

the morning it fell out of bed

and broke its worn hip on the sharp contradiction

of gated minds and communities coexisting with ghettoes

in the land of movies, where the curtain call of downtown

sounds something like: lights, camera, incarceration,

because police raid kills them dead and the innocent casualties

of undeclared civil wars are considered cockroaches,

the bedbugs in this dream who will magically disappear in the morning

if we take away their food, so welfare reform is disguised in stripes,

and stars, and placed behind bars where lady justice serves drinks

with a five year cover at the door and a mandatory minimum

sentence of life, now lady justice is dressed in revenge,

doing a keg-stand, binge-drinking oil as she rushes for war’s

sorority at a Republican Party where she was date-raped

on the morning of September 11^th, now justice

is in critical condition because the authorities

never stopped to ask the right questions, breathalyzing

a date-raped corpse and calling it diseased and addicted

when all that she suffers from is a healthy dose of apple pie

left to fester under sunny suburban dispositions

who fear that the streets are getting darker

earlier than they expected, so they put a Starbucks

on every corner in order to save their children.

It’s ten o’clock, do you know where your conscience is?

Parental supervision has no meaning when you’re dealing

with the children of children taught to look the other way

when crossing over to the other side of the track marks, mainlining

main street mentalities from junkie mothers who refer to “those people”

with a voice that drips with lethal injections, yet sings the praises

of O beautiful for spacious skies are falling

and amber waves of grain are crashing wall street parties

where the world the meek and the humble shall inherit

is traded in Enron stocks and Global Crossing bonds

that hold them in place beneath the deck of this slave ship,

and while lady liberty provocatively dances in G-strings

over circumcised purple mountains majesty,

American royalty stuffs her stockings full of cum-stained dollars

proving why premature ejaculation and pre-emptive strikes

are two heads of the same stolen coin

that can’t buy our children a borrowed future

that’s already been sold on margin for a loss.

And at the end of the rat race where the tortoise beats the hare

we tell our children allegorical stories with the moral that

slow and steady can win a race when nobody cares who wins,

as long as you run, and accept shopping-cart trophies in empty arms,

the unemployed staring at their own reflections in glass-cased futures

where window-shopping qualifies as casing, waiting for a job

qualifies as loitering, futures are buried six feet deep in unemployment lines

that stretch from borough to borough to the bottom of the East River

where Brooklyn Bridge suicides are waitlisted, while they wait

for some prime space to open up, as graves are gentrified

as icy East River waters are purified by blue eyed armies

who tell us to be all that we can be, hand us guns,

load barrels with bullets, define our potential

with a caliber, and nothing I can do, nothing

I can buy can scratch the serial numbers

from the weapons used to sleep

through this American Dream.

2008-07-28T17:42:00.003-04:00

Greetings from seclusion! I keep telling myself that I should be posting something on one of my various blogs, but the whole thing always feels so self-indulgent and self serving that I haven't bothered. Lately though, there have been a couple people who were wondering where the hell I've been, so I figured it was about time. So with that out of the way, here's what's been going on:

1) In the spring I applied for a scholarship to attend the one year residency program at the Hunter College School of Social Work. Basically, I get to keep working at Pathways To Housing, and get a fully subsidized MSW in the process. In May, I received a letter notifying me that I got the scholarship! Woo-hoo! As classes approach, I'm actually starting to look forward to going back to school. Best case scenario, this will rekindle my interest in all things intellectual and serve as the kick-in-the-ass I all too possibly need. Worst case scenario, I get a terminal degree for free. Either way, not too shabby.

2) Kristen and I are still together. It's been over three years now....officially my longest relationship. I never would have thought it when we first got together, considering that we're the one-night-stand that never ended, but I can't imagine my life without her now. I love her more and more every day, and to watch her continue to grow into this confident and determined and amazing person who believes in herself....it's a joy to watch. Really. She's finishing up at the French Culinary Institute later this year, and then she'll be looking for jobs. She loves doing what she does, and I find myself sometimes envying her for that. I don't know if I love anything as much as she loves cooking...

3) Which brings me to....poetry. Ah yes, my ex. My on again, off again, fickle lover. The self-indulgent bitch I can't ever seem to come to terms with. I don't know what to say about her. And I think that part of the reason I haven't been updating this blog is because my relationship with her is what always compelled me to keep up a public persona. Nowadays, I just don't care. Don't care about performing, or publishing, or touching people with my work. Honestly, I'm doubtful that my work would ever make a bit of difference, even if I did devote my life to it. The fact that I can disappear off the face of the planet for months at a time, without the world missing a beat seems to attest to that fact. So why bother? Does that mean I won't write anymore. No. I write because I have to, and there will undoubtedly come a time in my life where I'll have to write my way out of one predicament or another. But for now, I'm tired of trying to be something I'm not. My whole identity as a writer is bound up in my social identity, and it's become increasingly difficult to maintain the pretense of sociability when the whole thing is so awkward and painful for me. I do it to prove to myself that I can, but what's the point of only doing something so you can say that you did it--when you don't derive joy from it. Lately, I'm more concerned with doing what I want to do.....which may seem completely selfish. And to some extent it is. I've spent most of my life being miserable, either on account of my depression, my inability to change a world that doesn't seem to want fixing, or as a result my ongoing attempts to ingratiate myself into the world of "normal people". Well, the truth is, I'm not normal, I'm tired of saving the world (though I'll inevitably continue to try my best to do it), and the best thing for my depression is often just to focus on what's important to me, instead of worrying about what other people might think. Lately, I've been questioning the extent to which my choices even matter. Sure, I do quite a bit to help others, and so much of my life has revolved around trying to do the right thing, but in my absence won't there always be someone else to do the same thing? I could devote the rest of my life to creating literature, possibly at the expense of my own happiness. Or, I could sit around playing video games and getting high (purely hypothetical, of course). In the end, I'm not convinced that choosing to do one or the other will make the slightest bit of difference. Beyond that, even if I'm not writing, I'm still devoting the majority of my life to helping my clients. So it's not as if not writing makes me any less of a good person, right? Don't answer that. I suppose that this is when most people start a family, or find God, or whatever it is that people do when they approach 30 and recognize that the world existed before you, it will go on existing after you, and the odds of your making a significant difference to it are waning by the day. Oh, delusions of grandiosity, where have you gone? ;-) So what do I do? Continue to force myself to brave a world that makes me more miserable and lonely the more I confront and fight it? Or, paradoxically, take refuge in what I have, enjoy the peace and quiet and tranquility my relative isolation affords, even if it comes at the expense of my ego's longing to be remembered? Obviously I've been opting for the latter of late, and part of me wants to be convinced otherwise.....but I'm skeptical, to say the least....

4) I say relative isolation because lately, I want more of it. I'm tired of noise. Sirens. Obnoxious people. Belligerent people. Arrogant people. Stupid people. People. I want peace and quiet. I want to be left alone. I don't want to have to bite my tongue and grin and bear it for fear that opening my mouth will lead me to blow up and make a decision I'll end up regretting. Maybe moving to New York, for all of the wonderful things that have happened to me here, isn't a long term solution for me. I don't think the suburbs are either. Lately, I keep imagining living on some nice, secluded land, far away from the constant tension I feel in this place. I carry it all with me....all of it. In my body--my shoulders are so sore. In my jaw--Kristen can hardly sleep next to me. I feel like I'm constantly on the verge of exploding, and while I don't want to hurt anyone, there are so many times I'm tempted to let it all out, fuck the consequence. There are so many peope who prey on the patience and decency of people like me, and like I've written before, I'm tired of biting my tongue. I feel like the next chapter of my life, maybe in a couple years, will be quiet.....just the word itself makes me feel better.....quiet. Ahhh. That's all I want. Maybe an organic garden full of fruits and vegetables. We could harvest them and cook our own food. No one to bother me. No one to hurt me. I'm not talking Unabomber or anything crazy like that (though I'm a little disturbed myself at how easily this feeling could start to turn into that). I'm hardly a Luddite. I love my technology. I like being able to engage with the world--from a distance. But this place, it doesn't feel right for me anymore. I can't carry it all on my shoulders. I can't take all of the constant hostility: from my clients, from strangers, from the kids who loiter outside of my door making noise day and night. I just can't take it anymore, and in the absence of being able to up and leave (which isn't feasible at this time), I take solace in my fantasy. A nice little house in the country. A fire out back. Watching the sunset. Picking fresh fruit from the garden. Honestly, it sounds like the nicest thing in the world....Dear lord....I've gone domestic...lol.

5) I could prattle on about politics, and pop culture, and make my little inane observations. But hoenstly, who cares, really? Maybe I'll come back around to a place where I feel like it matters. Maybe I'll miss feeling witty and insightful. But for now I'm confident that the world is just fine with me in the margins. It's really where I'm most comfortable. And who am I to argue with that?

2008-01-23T22:20:00.001-05:00

There is no God...

2007-10-01T19:19:00.001-04:00

The Greatest Song Ever...

2007-08-27T23:41:00.000-04:00

This happened right outside my apartment earlier today....

A twelve year old girl got hit by a stray bullet. The bodega they show in the video is directly across the street from my place. So between the grandmother in the wheelchair who was killed by a stray bullet outside my old apartment, and a 12 year old girl getting shot outside of this one, I've been in the middle of two senseless shootings. And that's not even to mention the guy who got shot in the face three blocks from my place on Franklin Avenue. Or the guy that I almost stepped on trying to get on the train at Franklin, who had been stabbed in a triple stabbing, and was just laying there on the ground in a pool of blood.

At least this girl got lucky. She'll be alright.

And then there's shit like these shootings, which happened a little while back a little ways up the block from where I used to live on Franklin. It says that the one guy was buying a lottery ticket. Damn. If that's not one fucked up poem waiting to happen, I don't know what is.

And I like my neighborhood, but this shit needs to stop. Stupid wannabe-gangster drug dealers and fake ass thugs gotta go and mess it up for all the rest of the decent people who live around here. It's not right. This kind of shit makes me want to move out into the middle of nowhere, far away from anywhere where I'll have to worry about the idiocy of people getting other people killed for no good reason.

Whatever...I'm still alive. So I guess I'm one of the lucky ones.

What's wrong with people?

Never mind our government torture and terror, genocide, and every other thing that leaves you wishing you could just give yourself a lobotomy. I guess what bothers me even more when it's right outside your door is that you can't escape it. You can stop watching the news, you can disengage yourself from politics (why I'm a social worker now, as opposed to the political activist I once was), but it's like this is the world's way of insisting that, no matter how hard you try to convince yourself you live in an essentially decent world, surprise fucker, it's just not. No matter how much good you can do, no matter how much refuge you take in love and doing something positive with your life, you'll always come back to the screaming reality of this shit. I feel like I do when I was fifteen and I had a psychologist, and I would sit there and run through the litany of fucked up things that I saw in the world, and all he would tell me, after perseverating for an hour at a time, was that--while he totally agreed with everything I was saying--he just didn't agree with my emotional response to it. And this is not to blame him. He was right. But that's the point. The cold hard truth at the base of that is that part of growing up is just accepting that the world is a cold and uncaring, fucked up place, and that in order to live a decent live, you just have to accept that as a fact of the world and move on. And each day it gets a little bit easier. News of genocide is filler between checking my fantasy football scores and and my fantasy baseball scores. Kids getting shot is something I check because I see police tape and thirty cop cars while I'm across the street getting Guinness so I can kick back and watch some Bob Saget stand-up (I'm serious, don't knock it until you've tried it....fucker is brilliant). The war in Iraq becomes fodder for some good jokes on the Daily Show. We resort to absurdity to make sense of a reality that's too often too hard to bear. I love the shit, because it makes the fucked up world we live in a little more bearable, and makes me feel a little less crazy. And what's the alternative? The only unbearable thing, is that nothing is unbearable....

Anyways, I digress. So if you ever wonder why I blog about gay monkey porn, or being the lovechild of Euhud Barak, Julie Andrews, P Diddy, a young Sean Astin, and Luca from the second floor....it's because of shit like this. Because that shit is funny. But all this other shit.....it just isn't. Peace and Love Fuckers. Hug Somebody.

Your Loving Curmudgeonous Fuck,
mcs

2007-08-26T14:08:00.001-04:00

What I've Always Known Deep Inside...

It's strange, because for years people have been asking me: "has anyone ever told you that you look like a mix of Julie Andrews, P Diddy, Jackie Chan, a young Sean Astin, Luca from the second floor, and the prime minister of Israel?" And I'm always like, "yeah, but really, who doesn't?"

2007-08-26T14:03:00.000-04:00

Warning: This Post Is Rated NC-17!

....with that warning out of the way--Welcome. This post will not be for the squeamish.

1. So in the midst of Kristen telling me that I should switch my Trillian (IM) icon to something different "butt fighting monkeys" (her typo)....which inevitably compelled me to google "monkey sex" to mess with her. Ladies and gentleman.....if I can impress one thing upon you, don't ever google "monkey sex" without a filter. Ever. For one, I found out that there is a website called beastclub.com, which advertises itself as the "web's first gay beastiality website". And all I can think about is, really, there's a market for this? Really?!?! I mean, are there really people out there thinking "Ya know, I've wanted to get into beastiality, but the idea of a monkey getting it on with a human female....I don't know....it just doesn't do it for me. But gay monkey sex.....Eureka!!!." And then I started thinking about some guy out there, browsing through his favorite beastiality websites thinking "damn, this is some damn fine monkey porn", and he comes upon this site and he's like "oh....jesus....human males....and male monkeys together....now THAT'S JUST SICK!!!! May Jesus have mercy on your souls!!! If there's one thing I know, it's that the creator intended for male monkeys and human females to be together, and anything else, well that my friend is just an abomination of nature!!!"

2. This picture cracked me up.

"Awww....I give you perfectly meaningless monkey love and you're gonna make me cuddle? Really? Let's not try to turn this into something it isn't babe, kay?"

3. Has anyone else noticed how they've been taking less and less attractive women and putting their pics on the myspace new friend invitations? Apparently they caught on to the fact that most of us know that women who look like the ones who have been trying to friend us don't talk to people like us, so we've just started ignoring the friend requests. But, these new women actually look like real people, so you have to actually click on the link to see if the friend invite is real or not. Damned you, you crafty bastards! You got me again! What I'm waiting for is the day that they start using pictures of one-legged, Quasimodo looking women in an attempt to guilt me into friending them. So, I'm apologizing in advance to any one-legged Quasimodo looking women out there who sincerely want to be my friend. Ya know what? I want to be your friend too, but people like this are making that impossible. And when a demented man and a one-legged Quasimodo looking woman can't be friends anymore, well....I don't even want to have to think about living in that kind of world.....Damn you myspace!!!!

4. Many of you know Guy Lecharles Gonzalez. But what you may not know is that he made a video back in the day that's been all over the internet lately. If you see him, give him a shout out cuz he's bashful about it, but he really deserves the props. The man's a genius. Seriously. Just check out the video.

He's all growed up now, but as brilliant as ever!

5. I have a client whose mother is completely incapable of brevity. Quite literally, it takes her twenty minutes to tell you why she's calling: "Hello, how are you. I am calling to tell you that I would like to tell you something. Because my son is in the program and because he is in the program I think that it is good to tell you things. So I call you to tell you things because this is what I think that it is good for me to do. Because he tell me that I call Pathways, and I think that that is a good idea"....etc, etc, etc.....I swear I'm not exagerrating. Our office manager will tell me that I have a phone call and won't tell me that it's her, and I'll literally spend the next half hour deciphering her telling me that her son just needs us to deliver medication to him! I think it may be a language thing because she's Hatian, but damn woman! Spit it out!!!!

So she called the other day to say that her son was in the hospital and that she thought that someone had been putting drugs in her son's food. I think that someone else was telling her this, because in spite of speaking only broken english with a thick Hatian accent, she's like "yes, I think someone put trees in his food." Trees? And so I was like "fo shizzle? They came all up in his crib, all up up da heezy and put trees in ya boys food? Man, that shit get me so heated, I'm bout to smoke an El right now!" ;-)

And she was like "yes, the teenage boys he have in his apartment--maybe they did it." And really, that's just messed up. I mean, what kind of world do we live in when a man can't have sex with teenage boys without having to worry about them putting drugs in his food?" Na'mean?

I could go on and on about my clients, but I'll leave it at that for now. If you want more client stories, just say the words and I'll post a couple more.

Hello......hello......anyone out there? Fine, I never liked ya'll anyways!

Trying My Hardest To Let The Real Me Shine,
mcs ;-)

2007-08-08T22:27:00.000-04:00

This Is Awesome!

2007-08-08T22:03:00.000-04:00

Oh yeah, this too...I know, I should be living in a cave, but I miss this shit...

2007-08-08T21:31:00.000-04:00

I know, I'm a Neanderthal, but this shit's cool...

2007-07-27T18:24:00.001-04:00

The Big Apple

New York is the cemeteries of Queens. Its smiling headstones.

The Hudson poking fun at the East River from over Manhattan’s shoulder.

The seductive skyline of the Manhattan Bound Q.

It is a salty sunset at Battery Park, the jibaro yawn of strawberry fields.

It is the Day-Glo dawn of Times Square.

The melodious boi of Eastern Parkway

hummed over the Talmud, the t’ai chi dawn of the parks of Queens.

It is the soy-stained plantains and chicken wings of Chinese restaurants,

Indio-Cubano-Chinese joints staffed by Mexicans and Puerto Ricans.

It is Bootleg DVDs, $1 batteries, and the helium inflected hiccup of a clacker

clutched like a ticket stub for entrance into the American Dream.

It is guys named Country who will never leave the city.

Neighborhoods composed of men with names like Panama, Grenada, and Jamaica,

domino games that sound like a meeting of the United Nations.

It is being able to call a bunch of people walking down the street a parade.

It is piraguas, snow cones, shaved ice, raspados, frio frio, halo halo, patbingsu, and kakigori,

none of which are the same thing as Italian Ice.

It is experiencing every culture in the world, without ever leaving your block.

It is the welcoming arms of Ellis Island, a city of immigrants living in a country

that has forgotten where it came from.

It is hustlers and pimps prostituting portfolios on Wall Street.

It is the courage to oppose a war fought in our names,

marching through the ashes of our own.

It is a place where even our Republicans are too rational and progressive

for the rest of the country.

It is standing in the footsteps of those that came before you,

to hear the echoes of those who have stood on this hallowed ground.

It is Whitman’s Yawp, Ginsberg’s Howl. It is “Smoke? Smoke?” “Some change?”

“Batteries?” “DVDs?” “Newports? Newports?” It is “excuse me ladies and gentleman,

I am here today selling candy bars for my basketball team.” And, of course, everyone’s

favorite remix “I’m not selling candy bars for my basketball team, I’m just a kid trying

to make an honest dollar instead of selling drugs or doing something bad.”

It is being in a monogamous relationship with a train, to know the difference

between the 2 and the 3, the 4 and the 5, the 1 and the 9, to ride the train

to the end of the tracks, to take the R to the E to the G to the above ground transfer

to the 2 or the 3 to make a two hour commute between Brooklyn and Queens, to know

that you’re only moving one mile.

It is card games being played in the back rooms of Bensonhurst.

It is knowing enough to avoid the green puddles on Saint Patrick’s Day,

and any puddle of any kind that you see on an elevator, stairwell, sidewalk,

subway platform, ceiling, or any surface of any kind.

It is knowing which bodegas sell what and which ones to avoid.

It is roller disco Saturdays in Central Park.

It is the best team in baseball….and the Mets.

It is Jackie jacking the color line out the park.

It is a borough that lost its baseball team.

It is a blackout where no one got hurt.

It is physically impossible graffiti tagged onto the ethereal elevations of buildings above

and darkness sprayed depths of stray-light speckled tunnels below.

It is a foot of snow being called a blizzard.

It is the women, the first day of summer, a calendar whose days are defined in flesh,

a daily regimen of “what ifs”, the sore neck inducing whiplash switch of a hip.

It is love triangles defined in the length of a train ride, the downcast geometries of loneliness.

It is admiring the God Damn of the curves of the Brooklyn Bridge, wires clinging like straps

to the body of one of the city’s last monogamous pieces of sky.

It is summer’s humid breath blowing in your face, begging for some tongue.

It is the view from Central Park, staring into the face of the surrounding city’s gap-toothed

sun-gilded adolescent grin, scaffolding like braces to shape the still awkward smile.

It is the way that you’re so….dirty. And I kind of like that.

It’s the way that you’re thick, the bulging backside of Brooklyn and Queens, the oversized head

of the Bronx, and Staten Island….well, some things you just got to learn to love.

It is more New Yorker than American, more Brooklyn than city, more block than borough.

It is a place where tragedies leave beauty marks, where hunger just gives us

another mouth to feed a bite from this big, dirty apple, a heart pumping

blood, this city inside us, so when we die, you can bury the rest,

but you can never whittle this core from our chests.

2007-07-10T18:44:00.000-04:00

The Intimacy of Bullets

You could take a census of my hometown

using the lists of the names of the kids I hoped to kill at 13

headless chicken scratch scribbled in furious broken tipped pencil—

I know why kids kill:

In sixth grade

I scraped skin from my knuckles

without knowing why I did it.

I grew a garden of scabs

that bloomed into scars.

In eighth grade

I didn’t want guilt

gilded onto my gravestone

so I carved swastikas onto my arms,

because if I could only convince

my Jewish father not to love me

it wouldn’t hurt so much to leave.

In tenth grade I burned a key onto my wrist

to remind me that some doors shouldn’t be opened.

I wear a watch over this scar as a reminder

that time can cover a wound, but it can never erase it.

At 18

I had bleached blond dreadlocks

and cheeks so sunken into my jawline

I could chew on them.

They always tasted better than my thoughts.

I’m writing this for kids who play on playgrounds

drawing their own chalk outlines

who savor the taste of the word Columbine, swishing

it around in their mouths like a fine wine, refusing

to swallow, who dream of it like a first burgundy kiss.

Connoisseurs who would give anything to

cleanse this taste from their palate—

if only they could.

I know why kids kill:

acned and pockmarked with desperation on their breath

so awkward even their shadows run for cover

alone at the lunch table

the last kid picked for the team

struggling to read along

stuck in the closet

too dark, too light

too fucked up and terrified

to even leave the house,

who will themselves into ghosts

and disappear from rooms at will.

For those who have accepted this most tragic of gifts.

I know why kids kill:

because they are the blemish on the face of a society

that loathes its imperfections, concealed behind mountains

of lipstick, cover-up, mascara, and rouge,

pentagrams, fishnets, Doc Martens and trench coats,

Mohawks, mullets, and Marilyn Manson T-Shirts.

Because being hated for your fashion sense

is always better than the incomprehensibility

of just being hated.

being feared, better

than being ridiculed.

Because mommy and daddy’s hatred of Ahmed

isn’t all that different from Billy’s hatred

for the Goth kid in his English class.

Because too often laughter is the language of the soul

who had nothing good to say to you.

Because the most popular thing in the world

is a cheerleader’s sneer,

the words faggot thrown

from a quarterback’s lips.

Because Paris Hilton. Because Britney Spears.

Because the ordinary, the invisible,

the ones who find themselves

minor underwritten characters

in their own autobiographies,

and sometimes we all want to be stars,

but on a stage that has already made it abundantly clear

that it has no place for us—

and then we wonder why, for some,

infamy can be life’s consolation prize.

I know why kids kill:

Because they are too busy writing suicide notes

to do their homework, and most go quietly, sentencing

themselves guilty for crimes they never committed.

I know why kids kill:

Because murder is a dying dream in the eye of an aspiring suicide

who knows they haven’t even experienced enough to want to give up—

even in desperation the red taste of justice caught in the back of your throat.

I know why kids kill:

Because like any kid, sometimes you just want to be held,

and when arms fail you there’s nothing more intimate than a bullet,

the word crazy,

the post-mortem straightjacket we wrap around the explanation

pat on the back claiming this wasn’t preventable, we couldn’t

have known, reason isn’t something that stopped making sense

to these kids a long time ago, so everything is okay, nothing

needs to change, cruel and unusual punishments aren’t

handed out like homework, caskets and body bags

are just school supplies, and riding the horns

of the day’s scapegoat down to the ground

will somehow make a difference.

That it isn’t us, it’s them.

I know why kids kill:

Because this generation’s after school specials are R-Rated.

Because at 13 you don’t know

that your entire life is ahead of you.

that somewhere out there, there is a place for you.

Because you haven’t yet learned that not everyone

is as cruel as a 13 year old, that the best revenge

is living, middle fingers in the air, waving

like wings in the receding faces

of people so far away

from you that they look

like ants

and you

like a star

in a sky

that they will never

be able to touch.

2007-06-27T17:42:00.000-04:00

Rock The Bells... So I got tickets for Kristen and I to go to Rock The Bells on July 29th on Randall's Island. This lineup is sick: Rage Against The Machine, The Wu-Tang Clan, Nas*, Cypress Hill, The Roots, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Erykah Badu*, Rakim*, EPMD, MF Doom*, Pharoahe Monch, FELT *, Sage Francis, Hieroglyphics*, Immortal Technique, Living Legends*, Blackalicious*, The Coup*, Murs*, Jedi Mind Tricks, Brother Ali*, Cage*, Mr. Lif*, Grouch & Eligh*, Hangar 18*, Blueprint* and Lucky I AM*, plus very special guests Public Enemy who celebrate their monumental 20-year anniversary. DJs on all dates are Mike Realm, C-Minus, Icy Ice and Rocky Rock. The ROCK THE BELLS festivals will be hosted by Supernatural, Rahzel and Hi-Tek. (*Performing select cities.) Challa at ya boy if you're going.

2007-06-25T19:46:00.001-04:00

Funniest Thing Ever.

I was watching the Colbert Report the other night and he talked about this drug called Alli. I've always loved all those drugs where the side effects are a million times worse than what they claim to treat. I've heard of lots of them, but this one takes the cake. The side effects for Alli include (I kid you not:

gas with oily spotting
loose stools
more frequent stools that may be hard to control

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Oh my God that shit is funny!!!! But it gets better. As you read on it tells you the following:

You may feel an urgent need to go to the bathroom. Until you have a sense of any treatment effects, it's probably a smart idea to wear dark pants, and bring a change of clothes with you to work.

What?!?!!?!?! Really?!?!?!

And the best part is that, were this drug for treating cancer, I could understand it, but it's a frickin' weight loss supplement.

"Hi, I could never lose weight and keep it off until I started taking Alli. While the drug itself isn't all that effective, the fact that I constantly smell like gas and perpetually shit myself has left me so depressed that I can't eat anymore. My life is a hollow shell of what it once was, I see no hope is continuing to live, and I think I just shit myself......but I look great!!!! Thank you Alli!!!

Here's the link to the page: http://myalli.com/howdoesitwork/treatmenteffects.aspx

As someone who loves absurdity, I can't think of a better time to be alive. I am truly blessed.

2007-06-05T17:59:00.000-04:00

Bulletpoints...

1. I've been relocated from Franklin Avenue to Kingston Avenue while my building undergoes renovations. I feel like I'm single-handedly embarking on a top secret mission for Project Snowflake.

2. Gentrification is everywhere these days, and for anyone who deals with this issue on a personal level, and not just as an abstract, intellectualized concept, it's a difficult issue to work through. To simply displace people from where they live is unconscionable. But living amidst crime, harassment, and urine soaked everything isn't exactly a picnic either, and none of the other solutions seem to be taking care of that. Is it that the city no longer cares about the way that people in poorer sections of the city behave, as long as they "stay where they belong"? Is it that children of the system are being raised by children of the system, where those competing senses of entitlement and having nothing lead to an utter lack of respect for your community and those you share it with? Is it simply rage and hopelessness? Culture? A plot by the powers that be to undermine upward social mobility? I have my ideas, but I keep struggling with these questions, and most of the answers that myself and those who I live around come up with are somewhat disconcerting, to say the least...

3. Unless you have lived in the hood, worked in the hood, and know something of it outside of books you have read, you don't know anything about it. Good intentions, liberal ideals, and a tendency to romanticize the experience of poverty can complete blind people to the reality of the situation....and to the fact that there are plenty of good, hard-working people struggling to get by alongside people who make gentrification seem like an attractive option....and plenty of them would just as soon see their rents increase if it meant that they could live in a nice, clean, and safe place.

4. The entire issue comes down to reasonably priced housing, and the extent to which the city is committed to maintaining a working class population in this city....or is it the case that "the help" (anyone making less than six figures annually) will be expected to commute into the city to serve our corporate masters and overseers...a domestic immigrant worker program....second class citizens...hell, it's obvious that those of us who aren't wealthy are considered second class citizens, why not formalize it? No....that would be too honest. People might get upset, stop watching television, buying things. We can't have that.

5. Yeah....enough of that. Damn. Christopher, Bobby, and Sylvio are dead.....on the Sopranos. now, if they would have had as much action in the last TWO SEASONS as they had on Sunday, Kristen wouldn't have resorted to renaming "The Sopranos" as "Sitting".

6. I think that she did that in response to me calling Grey's Anatomy "Feelings." I'm a McDick.

7. I managed to pick up some windfall books, since Oscar and Juan both abandoned them. Well, technically there's still a lot of stuff laying there on the apartment floor, but Oscar said that he has already taken all the stuff he needed, and Juan went AWOL. So yeah, I'm reaping the profits of having mah trusty Latinhoes in da Snackbox!!! That's right Oscar, I've got your books!!! Bring it beeyotch!!! Jack McCarthy sucka, and you ain't never gettin' it back!!!!....LOL!!!!!!

8. Kristen is the most adorable creature to ever exist. It's hard to talk about it, since we inhabit our own world, completely separate and distinct from everyday reality--and since most people I know would be either disgusted or terrified if I went into details. We have named over 50 inanimate objects in the apartment, including everything from blankets and pillows to our own anatomy. We have devised systems and classificatory schemes within the realm of this mutual universe. It is completely bizarre, alternately brilliant and infantile, and makes each day that much more of a pleasure to live. No matter how horrible of a day I'm having she always makes it better. She's the most giving, nurturing, patient person I've ever met, and one of the very few who knows how to deal with me. She's a diminutive little Asian package of happiness incarnate and I'd be lost without her.

9. And part of me feels horrible for it....because being so contented takes what little bit of sociability of demolishes it. Sociability for me has always been about trying to distract myself from having to think about things, and with her around, I don't particularly need distraction, or intoxication. Going out has always been incredibly difficult for me, and the only thing that has compelled me to continue going out has been, alternately, a sense of loyalty to people who have been there for me--and in the past--an overwhelming sense of loneliness and despair, which I knew would never go away living in a self-contained vacuum. And while one part of me feels horribly guilty for not going out more, and for allowing myself to simply take respite in this happiness, another part of me is completely relieved to not have to go out every night for no other reason than that the routine of going out was the only thing keeping me from simply packing it in and giving up. It's immensely difficult for me to go out and simply "be" with other people. I can do it at work because there's a reason for me to be there. But to simply hang out and "be" with other people is so horribly nerve-wracking that honestly can't go out without drinking--and part of me doesn't want to have to drink every day for the sake of having a social life. So yeah, in summation, I'm a McDick.

10. I signed up for a TIAA-CREF SRA. I feel old.

11. I strained my hamstring in my sleep the other night. I feel REALLY old.

12. I've had to starting watching my calories, since my metabolism apparently killed itself at some point over the last year or two. Did I mention that I feel old?

13. When I was in the process of moving I tried on some of my old jeans....and by old I mean, early twenties. I couldn't fit into them without inadvertently performing what has to be some antiquated version of liposuction, involving my stomach and a zipper, BUT, I COULD fit my entire body into one of the legs. Move over Methuselah, here I come!!!!

14. I didn't end of going on vacation in Buffalo, since the Buffalo Curse struck again and my Sabres found a way to choke in the end. And no, I didn't feel like going to Buffalo after a heartbreaking loss...which, by definition, is the only way Western New York could possibly be any more depressing (I know....I'm a hater....you know I love you deep down inside boo). That brief glimmer of hope only makes the crash that much more bleak--like having a really hot girl come onto you, only to have here steal your kidney.

14. I need to go on a trip somewhere. Where should I go?

15. This blog post is over.

16. Fin.

2007-06-02T13:35:00.000-04:00

Pushed from the Page

When I die,

tie my toe-tag around my tongue,

close my mouth, and scatter me

with the ashes from a pyre of poems,

scatter me with all that I loved.

Say he knew we are the ocean’s backwash

a wet, salty kiss pressed to pangea’s feet,

knew that he got sloppy six billionths.

that he lived his life in scribble, that his next life will be the edits

that he’s a never-ending poem written in disappearing ink, the blank sheet

and the final draft. I want the final draft burned and pushed from the page.

Say he had a thing for words,

paid conjugal visits to his dictionary

hoped to bust open the locks on his tongue

read the cracked scripture that floats

below the surface like a dead sea scroll

His family tree passed down on pages of looseleaf

so many children he owed Bic child support

a garbage can filled with a garden of abortions.

Say that he loved every person willing to forgive him

for having a voice that sounded like a dial tone

for the constant gurgle of Erie that echoed in his veins.

that he was born in a place where they cracked shivers open

and scraped them for nourishment, shucked open their insides

and gave themselves to each other, the sweet, almost too ripe fruit

bruised like sky, under clouds that blistered like welts, majored in escape,

minored in cartography, threshed the tainted meat of their brains harvesting flashbacks

a small town hunger that stripped everything raw, leaving behind only dream and bone.

Say that when it came to women, he had a glass jaw

and a desert between his teeth, a window in his throat,

a wet dream in his veins, a blue light special in his eyes

a peep show in his heart, but dripping neon the color of a stop sign

a kiss like a wrecking ball at the door, but inside a heart like an abandoned building.

Say that he loved every woman

who blinded him with her beauty

whose body language he read like Braille

who left him speechless, deaf and mute

fingers ringing.

That he burned at both ends

in a city that never slept, but always gave him a place to lay his head

to turn to ash, the glass never half empty or full, the glass was packed

and on his good days he had a smile that lit up like a quarter pound.

I want to be eulogized by beggars who call me a brother,

to be missed by loners who welcomed me

into their lonely rooms and offices.

To fall asleep with a mouth ready to rest, having tasted better days.

Say that on multiple occasions

he tested positive for life,

knew that it was a terminal condition.

He was being treated with a regimen

of sunrises and sunsets. He is currently in remission.

2007-05-05T19:39:00.000-04:00

Please!!!....I Could Play That With A Toothpick and And Some Dental Floss!

2007-05-02T17:20:00.000-04:00

1. My name is Matthew and I have a problem. I am hopelessly addicted to watching bad reality TV shows. And the worst part is that I have descended into that horrible place where you are watching spin-offs of spin-offs: The Surreal Life begat Flavor of Love begat twin I Love New York and Charm School spin-offs...and I watch all of them. This is my brain's raging sense of resentment. All of these shows are great in a watching a horrible car wreck before your eyes kind of way. Example (for anyone who watched the show)---that guy "Romance" on I Love New York. I have no words.

2. RIP Kurt Vonnegut. Thinking back, he was probably the reason I ever started to write in the first place, and reading him always reminds me why I need to, even when I feel like nothing more than giving up. He would have hated sappy eulogies, and would have definitely hated anyone intimating that he was anywhere but dead and gone. We'll miss you Kurt....and no, we won't see you soon ;-)

3. I'm horribly attracted to Avril Lavigne and I hate myself for it. There is no excuse for this.

4. Heroes is the best new show on television, and might be the best show period. That show is flat out sick. Probably the only show I'd put in the same class as 24. Entourage ain't far off either.

5. And then there's "Feelings", which is what I call Grey's Anatomy (in a really cheesy Nicholas Cage-esque voice--see: City of Angels), which I've been suckered into watching. Apparently no relationship can be without that one show that you get sucked into watching because your girl watches it. First there was 90210, then Dawson's Creek, and now Grey's Anatomy. I feel tainted....

6. I got Yankees tickets for Kristen and I this season--eight games throughout the season. Hopefully they can get their shit together before the next series against the Sox, because there's nothing worse than losing to the Sox at Yankee Stadium in front of Sox fans with the audacity to come to Yankee Stadium. Matty gonna cut a bitch!

7. I'm moving soon...not sure exactly when yet, while the snackbox undergoes renovations. I'm having a couple people over for the De La Hoya-Mayweather fight this weekend, and then my lil bro is coming down. I'll probably be moving shortly thereafter.

8. I can barely write lately. This blog isn't helping. It feels like a chore, and I have next to nothing to say. Whatever. I tried. Maybe I'll post again soon. Maybe not.

Hope all ya'll are well out there.

Peace.

2007-04-12T23:09:00.000-04:00

The Man

In the dilapidated ruin of America’s worst nightmare, the woman upstairs

is manifest content incarnate. When the war on poverty takes off

all its pretty makeup you will uncover the blight of her face, cringe

at a uterus paper-cut from the paychecks it has birthed, count

her babies daddies on her stretch marks like you can count years on the rings

of the tree. Love thy neighbor is a commandment dictated by a God who knew nothing

of chicken wing bones and used tampons in the hallways of a pantheon. I am

out of cheeks to turn and she is armed for a war, crouched behind a barricade

of OE bottles, discarded babies, and empty backpacks, blaring mind-numbing bass

at 3:00 in the morning.

It’s hard to sleep living underneath a stereotype that blares as loudly as this.

The psychological warfare of her reveille waking me up to a battle fought

on all the wrong fronts, swinging back at a moving target and I keep getting in the way,

while I pay for her to sit around shell shocked, funding her war instead of the one that kills

people who’ve done far less to me than she has, the kind of alcoholic war vet that makes children born under war torn skies safer. The people of Baghdad would give her the key to the city

if she promised not give copies to three-dozen of her friends. She is the reason being

serenaded by gunshots is only the second worst part of living in my building.

I didn’t hate her: the first six times she flooded my apartment, the first three times she stole my cable, when pleas for sleep were answered with decibels, when dirty looks littered the hallways

of the building, when I was christened “cracker-ass white boy” thinking that I smell like a pocket full of moldy cash, and her the hand that gropes in my pocket. I didn’t hate her, because to hate her was to take a fuzzy picture of a rumored monster and bring it screaming into focus, to become Dr. Frankenstein in taking the picture, to lend my name to that monster. I felt an immense need

to hide her from the Pat Buchanans of the world, like Anne Frank of Crown Heights only not nearly as sympathetic a character, like the information gathered from torturing me would break the New Deal’s withered body in two.

Like what stands in the vast expanse between myself and a burning cross, a white hood

and a MOVE bombing, between Emmett Till and a date with the Tallahatchie River

is a pale, desperate, twisting knowledge that I could never wade in those waters,

but I can never get far enough away from the terrifying water’s edge,

and I wonder how easy it is to slip on that muddy, bloodstained bank.

I wrote a novel, tracing the noose of her lifeline tried

to lift it into a halo, or at least a crown of thorns,

but at 800 convoluted pages, it’s a story even she

wouldn’t buy. I used to think that

one day she just cracked, like the soundtrack

of an antebellum nightmare, but sequels start to sound the same

the more you see them, and the blood on my hands disappears

faster than I clean them, and her blood smells nothing like

what I’m used to eating, and I can’t stomach this taste.

The only thing that I have ever been afraid to hate is the blinding light of her skin,

The terrible reflection of this ugly mirror I want to shatter, reflecting so much

over my shoulder, but to hate her is not to hate her skin, or the mirror, it is only to hate

her.

This is my crime—

It is a bloodless crime, with a bloody confession. Some

are the opposite of victimless, crimes without

a criminal, a rap sheet without an owner. When you fit

a description, skin alone becomes an indictment.

The Norman Rockwell caricature of my face

a walking wanted poster for The Man.

How will I recognize his face in my own

if I have never looked in that mirror?

recognize his words in my mouth

without hearing my own confession?

know if his crime is my crime

if I have never asked these questions?

--looked at the evidence against me

and tried my hardest to prove it.

2007-03-25T20:56:00.000-04:00

Checkpoint

Today a pregnant Iraqi woman

was shot to death

at a U.S. military checkpoint.

Call it a pre-emptive strike.

Two birds

a stone

a glass house

ground into sand.

The U.S. military releases a statement

like nerve gas,

calls this regrettable,

which is like calling an immoral war

poorly executed.

A nation aimlessly flips through channels,

falls asleep watching a rerun.

Its citizens caught mid-pose

in a sitcom style smile and shrug.

A moon executes the sun

and calls darkness a new beginning.

A monarchy’s second set of fangs

cut through the skin.

Its shitty diaper.

Its terrible two-hundreds.

A war criminal in soiled big boy pants

talks about justice.

When he speaks of war and death

there is a glint in his eye, a child

with a magnifying glass hovering

over an anthill, too dull to know

the damage he inflicts.

Somewhere a bomb drops from the sky

like overly ripe fruit gone bad

falling from a tree.

A seed

is planted

in the sand.

A hungry mouth

is grown with a windblown desert

between its teeth,

gargling on the world’s backwash.

An oasis goes catatonic

and forgets its name.

A nation’s geography

reshaped by a sandstorm

into a bruise.

A democratic color by numbers

chokes back amnesia.

The world’s womb

stomachs

an unwanted abortion.

A miscarriage misnamed revolution.

An apocalypse of blown candles.

An empty cradle.

A wrong turn.

A misread legend.

And a bullet to guide

like a star in a sky as black

as a hangman’s innocent hood.

2007-02-22T23:49:00.000-05:00

For Virginia--A New Poem

because the Mexican man said “why

the fuck is this monkey talking to me?”

because without saying a word the woman

at the churro stand handed her a tissue

to stem the stream of tears now forming in

her eyes, because the Puerto Rican boys

always told him that Mexicans are basura,

because the white boys always called

the Puerto Ricans dirty Mexicans,

because the words “hey white boy” always

preceded the first punch, because The Man

fired daddy and he wore rings and he was so

much bigger than me, because spic liked to

linger on his daddy’s drunken breath, because

the man behind the counter of the Mexican

restaurant always seemed so kind, because

kind is easy, because easy is what

we like to pound until the hardness goes

away, because he couldn’t leave the house,

because the world doesn’t wait, because those

black fists disfigured his face so bad his

children couldn’t recognize their father,

because he couldn’t feed his family,

because by the time that basura fell

from his mouth the churro stand was all he

had, because the woman standing in front

of him was kind, because she was easy,

because the white boy, because the spic,

because the monkey, because an eye for

an eye, because the 500 year long

tear sliding down her face, because you know

how it tastes, because her cheek was turned,

because like a fire it burns, because we

are the ones who feed it.

2007-02-10T22:27:00.000-05:00

Poem for the Classmates.com Advertisement that says “She Married Him? And They Have Seven Kids?”

If those children were not evidence of their love

then they would not seem so miraculous. But she

is all beak and lens and he is all teeth and gel.

There is no aesthetic justice in this.

We want the head cheerleader and the quarterback

to end up together, prom kings and queens to fulfill

their clichéd birthright—even if it is only so we that

can hate them. We want class reunions where nerds

bring back millions and laugh in the faces

of gold digging divas well past their prime,

the fat kid to come back with a six pack

and a tummy tuck. The kid that no one

remembers to come back a star.

But ugly and beautiful are not supposed to mix. Beauty is

only skin deep, but to not get the kind of gorgeous

that makes you want to gouge out your eyes,

there’s got a be a damned good reason.

We think that she has wrecked the curve, that he

has underachieved, that there has to be some kind

of remarkable explanation. So we click this link with

morbid fascination, thinking she nursed him

through a tragic car accident, or that the

molded plastic of her face caught his eye

in just the right way a spent life savings later.

Something about whips and chains and ping pong balls.

But real life is not nearly so interesting. Beauty is a threat

that holds love at gunpoint, and eventually we tire of standoffs.

We cultivate rap sheets that pose as personal ads, consummate

conjugal visits masquerading as marriages, build relationships

that end in shoot-outs. We fall prey to the basic con, thinking

that love itself is too trite to fall for.

But he will not hear this, knows that in an age of celebrities

who bear luxury children to wear them like diamond studded

accessories, his story is as hackneyed as they come—

that sometimes clichés can be beautiful.

So he ignores the stares. Cares more about the way his children

weather storms of snickers wherever they go. They are his children,

and they have learned his lessons. They know that love is not something

to be traded for the fleeting promise of flesh, and that unless they fall prey

to a logic that pimps providence one mouse-click at a time they will be okay.

And he knows that he could never have asked for anything more.

That his class was right all those years ago

when they voted him most likely to succeed.

That he loves the withering ruin

Of his wife’s aging face, each

of his seven beautiful children.

That what he loves most of all

is the way that each of them

looks exactly like their mother.

2007-01-21T19:48:00.000-05:00

How Lucky Can You Get?...

The New England Patriots are, hands down, the luckiest team in the history of the NFL (I won't even go into seasons past). You fumble to ball on fourth down, the ball rolls into a pile of three Colts, and then manages to squirt into the End zone for a N.E. TD?!?!

Or how about last week when San Diego (Marlon McCree) intercepts a ball on fourth down and then manages to fumble the ball back to New England who get a new set of downs. All the guy had to do was knock the ball to the ground or take a knee and the game's pretty much over. OR, how about the time the New England got stopped on fourth down and dumbass Drayton Florence gets hit with an unnecessary roughness penalty after the play, giving New England another first down.

Bill Bellichek has clearly sold his soul to the devil...

And Peyton Manning needs to start thinking about doing the same thing...

2007-01-18T20:55:00.001-05:00

You scored as Bragi.

Bragi

80%

Njord

70%

Loki

70%

Balder

60%

Freya

60%

Tyr

60%

Hel

50%

Odin

40%

Freyr

40%

Frigg

40%

Sif

40%

Thor

40%

Heimdall

30%

Skadi

30%

Which Norse God or Goddess are you most like?
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