SoQ repreZENT

I feel sleazy. I am not out in the heat doing physical labor, like my father once did, like my mother once did, like my sister does on Arcata farms, like my friends do in foundation pits and cherry factories.

I feel sleazy about that.

Have done it. Building sheds, canning, gutting and cleaning filthy apartments. But right now I'm just a slip of here and that, a waste of water.

Thus: sleaze.

I wrote a SoQ poem because my new SoQ life "amuses" me. The rich people in this town smell of plastic rosewood, maple cures (in bottles, in bottles of maple pills) and sloths (dead sloths).

But this has nothing to do with all that.

It's actually okay, I'm doing well. I've drafted three new short stories. Okay, raise your hand if you give a shit. You shouldn't. Turn to your favorite news source for pictures of charred buses, useless shrugs, a conflict dreary with thousands of years and gallons of hatred.

I wish this had something to do with all that.

I wish I could write something about that.

Should I?

This is two posts in one. That was the first post.

The next post: I wrote a SoQ poem because my new SoQ life "amuses" me. I couldn't stay the course. It sounds like James Tate eating confetti-colored mints. Oh well. I'm glad it's not too quiet.

Now That I Own a Door

Leave you outside, you said,
with the spider on my doorbell.
Well, maybe him? Does he want to
join me and drag-race an armored car?
Fill my molars with melted honey bears?
Stay up until two playing the mandolin
with me, lift me -- it has a nice ring.
Listen, kid: all of your friends are
burnt sod and none of them want to hear
the name June laughed from a tailgate
outside a stadium of grass like tall women
thinking about something else when
they lean into bus poles, when they
won't push the door before a sigh.
Your best bets are cable receipts
and neighborhood popsicle brats
in Hulk Hogan t-shirts, asking after
more kids. No, sorry. Just a crust
of sleet -- but lemme check the burners
twice, then the last gimp of my Crest.
I will find one yet to let back in.