4 poems
Manicure
I’ve kept drinking
and stopped cutting
my fingernails
I can rip into things
real nice right now
This bag of pierogis
hasn’t got a fucking
chance
against these talons
of indifference
and despair
I exercise my strength
in this way
daily,
dominating condiments
and meals alike
wishing everything else
would fall into place
like so
Pantone Matching System
Wonder what Pantone1
would name
the shade of yellow
that my piss is
on the third day
of a bender
It’s definitely my colour
of the year
Grooming My Regrets
As I’m shaving
the regrets
cross my mind
like a funeral procession
while the razor wanders my face
—the things I did to you
It’s a lot like my uncle’s dad’s funeral
It was a Jewish one
And we each took turns
shovelling the dirt over the open grave
until it was a closed grave
and the dirt was a mausoleum
Killing Dale Earnhardt
People are always so sure
that they can trace
the origins
of a troubled person,
like a school shooter,
to hours spent
playing some RPG,
or maybe enacting
violent fantasies
against women
in Grand Theft Auto
By this logic,
I think childhood psychologists
should’ve been alerted
to some kid I knew
growing up
in my suburb
It was a summer afternoon,
and it must’ve been
the year 2001
because earlier that February
NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt
was killed
during the last lap
of the Daytona 500
as he took the final bend
in his signature black
stock car
There are a couple of reasons
that this detail
is important:
first, the kid was playing
NASCAR
on Nintendo 64
with a friend
and Dale Earnhardt
was still a driver
that you could select
to race as
and second,
the kid was repeatedly
smashing Dale Earnhardt
into the fourth corner
of the simulated
Daytona 500
instead of just doing laps
like you were
supposed to
Eventually,
an adult noticed
what was going on,
how the video game
wasn’t being played
properly:
“If you’re going to do that,
I’m going to make you
turn this off,”
said the father
of the kid
who was not massacring
late NASCAR driver
Dale Earnhardt
in a holocaust of pixels
and primitive CGI
over and over
again
What kind of kid does that?
What kind of man do they grow up to be?
I was that kid
I killed Dale Earnhardt like 17 times that afternoon