Dane Cook At The Movies

The story goes something like,
4 a.m. on a Tuesday
Satan barfed up a set of small
figurines in a dark alley
of some forsaken North Carolinian
city's ghetto

they were shitty toys
from the early 1980s
bought for a quarter each
out of a vending machine

even as they oozed in Satan's
chunky milk looking vomit
you could make them out
on the alley's floor,
two inches tall,
in the early morning light

an orange muscle man,
with a large '6' in
permanent marker
over the stomach

a purple Venus de Milo,
formed from a wrestler
with pecks that had
been molded too conical

and a fat yellow camel
which Satan used as a target
to relieve his one-six-packed
too many bladder,
just before he skirted off to Kansas

magically, the camel changed into a fat faced
man, who ended up starring in movies
and letting his dog shit wherever

and who one night broke into his parents'
house after a night of binge eating
and puked in their hallway,
before falling flat onto the
wood floor

in that pre-shit-factory-up-chuck
laid a small maraschino cherry
atop a seven inch sausage
Dane had swallowed whole
and now it was laying there
once again outside him
in front of his glazing eyes,
something that was once truly his

as his lips let loose vomity spittle,
making bubbles that rested
then silently split in his heavy breathing,
Dane reached up for the sausage
and back in he put it
palming it once more through his lips
and down his throat,
where it got stuck

the funny part is those shitty toys
had been Dane's, he'd hoarded them
like he did everything else
but recently he'd started carrying them
in his underwear as a way to cope with
stress

some girls had been standing in line
for his new movie when Satan
came around to put a touch of the cancer
in a little kid's hip
and whisper 'fatty' in a teenager's ear

Dane was driving drunk nearby
and when he spotted Satan he knew,
he had to kill him

so he drove right into the line at the
theater, killing the kid, and the teen
and the girls who wondered who this fat
faced drunk was.

But, how Satan ended up with the toys
and how Dane was absolved,
I leave up to you.

A Life After Arts

For Dennis Cooper

“You get to feeling like a fixture,
set in 1966,
time came that we drifted apart,
drifted apart,
to find an identical twin.”

– Stephen Malkmus, “Old To Begin”

I'm a poem that can do five things.
I can rhyme career with Korea.
I can say Kankoku.
I can do a variation of that with:
Sea of Korea, career.

I'm a lazy poem.

Without social grace, with no sense of taste,
as you've seen, and totally unacceptable.
You could argue those first three things
are hardly unique, and moreover,
condescending.

But at least I do those pretty well.

The other two things I can do are to say
that this girl I was nuts about in high school is now
incredibly successful, upper level and climbing
names with initials firms successful,
and that she has a monozygotic twin,
who maybe I once lost sleep over.

But I can't tell you she's Korean exactly. Nor can I explain
things about that, Japanese and American people,
and language, with contexts for all of it in the sense of
outlining the environment for which these events
occurred, while actually illustrating something else,
something about me, or vice versa. Though, you should know
an event can be anything.

Oh, but I can almost do something else.

I can almost talk about what I'm feeling in an interesting way.
I'm also practicing humanizing an obsession by getting over not
taking a Latin class eight years ago. Which might be partially why
I'm in my second year of Japanese. And, I feel so blank at times,
so much so that it feels I might stay that way forever.

Or maybe I'm confusing something for myself that's really something else. Something that's not part of me. Maybe all I really can do is be a poem that steals a possibly misheard couplet from a Pavement song, all the while trying to talk about this girl I once could say I knew in a way equal to the beautiful somethings
I'm supposed to have experienced. Which I can't seem to do.
And maybe only one of those things was ever interesting.

Anyway, apparently she gave up arts for something to do with money.

Poem For Yayoi Kusama

when I was a little girl
it was a hundred drawings
and that was just before breakfast
now it's a thousand dots
and I'm an old woman
I do all those before lunch

it used to be fists
punching into my face
but that was just my mother
and that face was just me
way back then
I was smaller and
there was still an outside
to run to

I got naked in public
as a young woman
when New York City wasn't a cliché
and Warhol was still Andy
there are films of this

I returned to Japan
and lived in an asylum
which is where I work today
self check in
that shows courage, understanding
a degree to help and function
I've done circles, curves, everything

red dots, on white
blue dots, on aquamarine
yellow dots, on black
and now there's so many

I paint large circles on floors,
walls, the dresses of little girls
who are really sculptures, molds
dots everywhere, and the girls
look at the world and I can't explain it

maybe they ask why
but they don't demand,
it's different and they're standing