Uncle Daddy Dot Pizza

In a Chinese restaurant karaoke bar with no one singing, I read a headline on a muted TV: Brazilian teen offers virginity for money. I think fondly of my fullbush first time with a boy who later wrote me a poem entitled “An ass crack I hold dear”. I leave by the back door. In the alley, a pigeon preens and pecks at a rainbow puddle.

The only man who ever loved me
Picked his nose on the subway, only owned white socks.

Every pleasure exacts a price, every dimwit gobbles bandwidth.

I’ve been thinking about moving out of the city, taking a teenage lover,
scarfing obscure hallucinogens in an orchard.
Fresh start type of thing.

June dusk bonfire
Sparks pop from a log, mount thermal
swirls
Ashlight lilting across a crepuscular meadow
Indistinguishable from
courting fireflies.
Lovely, no?

Newsflash: Actually, this anthropocentric framing ignores the fact that many lightning bugs burn their tiny dicks off each year, believing that the detritus of your marshmallow roast is the glowing abdomen of a potential mate. Not exactly worthy of a poem now, is it, you asshole?

Never one to tussle hair,
what has stayed with me instead
is the exquisite vulgarity of my grandfather’s curses,
their vaguely Teutonic syntax.

“Christ tits!” [after he put his back out varnishing a ceiling fan]
“Cunt slapper!” [while hurling a subpar lasagna into the kitchen sink]

In current nomenclature, “Alcohol use disorder”.
In the family dialect, “He was in the war”.
A miserable prick, by all accounts.

But one time:
Inexplicably, dreamlike to me now, he and I alone for a walk in woods near ocean.
We veered off the path immediately, wended through the trees
to the steep rocky rim where the sea
lapped.
We clamored our way over those rocks – no easy feat for child or old man – as if the trail had petered out, as if we had no choice.
His insistence made sense to me then and still does.

A child’s mirthful whoop slaloms into earshot.

The panhandler looks up from her crossword, shakes her head as they careen by, father and son.

“How’d you end up in a wheelchair?”
“My father was giving me a ride on his wheelchair.”

Today, they let me climb all over a glacier while peeling an orange.
So sometime soon, I reckon, I’ll be getting my balls waxed on the moon
while marveling at how well nut milk froths in zero gravity.

***

Some hippies in a river the colour of a novelty shot.
“God has a head injury and the aurora borealis is his fucked up aura!” I shout at them.
I’m drowned out by a freight train bearing
electric pickup trucks,
THC-infused rootbeer
To some place I’m glad I’m not.

I would have venerated her just for her limericks about the Holy Ghost.
But then not decaying per the standard rot/time curve?
You have to admire her range.

Slight quibble with the origin story, though:
What was up with her consoeurs popping the pine top
and oogling Wilhelmina’s mortal remains?
Exhumation for an upgrade to a cubby in the abbey crypt, sure.
But, after presumably letting voles rustle her robes for years,
while some gaudy shroom worms its face through her nostril,
They decide to just take a gander?

But back to the miracle at hand and
mysterious ways being what they are:
Pristine Wilhemina.
Beatifiable flesh on bones.
Inexplicable.
Incorruptible!
The type of thing that only happens in Europe or
St. Louis.

Even sewer water sparkles under the sun
Even wrens grow sick of beignets

Big Chief Beef chartered a barge to swirl icing sugar
into the river
(Fistfight at a biology conference over whether the fish got diabetes)

They called it the Fudgetown Massacre.

The sun lunged into the water
Like a spaniel bred to retrieve whales
Brief tangerine smudge then
nightfall.

Later,
in the motel room
I rinse salt out of your bathing suit in the sink
Lay out a picnic on the microbiome of the bedspread.

Later, later
I go for a dip in you.

You might wonder where Glen got his magical turtle*.

It started with his brain operation. Glen had a parasite in his brain and had it removed in a private hospital with many luxury amenities. His room, for example, had a fireplace and cable TV. He had a private nurse who had access to a fridge full of pudding. Etcetera.

Since they were spoiling him rotten, Glen decided to ask if he could keep the brain parasite after they removed it. The surgeon made a face like “we don’t usually do that” but at the same time, he didn’t really give a shit and his daughter wanted to go to gun camp, which was expensive. So when Glen was brought back to his room after the procedure, the thing was in a urine sample cup on the bedside table. It looked like a wiggly black chunk of muscle, like if you carved a wedge out of an eel with an exacto knife.

As soon as he was sprung from the luxury pudding hospital, Glen went fishing and used the brain worm as bait. He caught his magical turtle on the first cast.

*Jewel-encrusted shell, can fly, grants wishes

-Jogging in jeans
-Vaping on the moon
-Jerking off in yurts
-Screaming at my wife while we ride a tandem bike