I used to write a magazine. And now I have to piss. And smoke a cigarette. Isn’t this poetic? I’m being poetic… On an empty stomach (part of my mental illness). Living with mental illness is like smoking a cigarette on an empty stomach on the seventh floor of an apartment building in Da Nang, Vietnam, in the heart of the touristy/expat section of a small Vietnamese city that has seen almost two weeks straight of rain with no letup in sight. How about that cigarette? Don’t open the front window! The rain will get in. *** I have decided not to smoke a cigarette out the front window which is a sliding-glass door nor at the side window which opens outward. I am hungry, stomach growling. Bad morning—leaking ceiling in the bathroom. Had brought it up to my landlord after spending three nights here, finally moving after living for about four or five months on Le Quang Dao—a main artery which connects the south of the city with a central area. I almost got into a tiff (fight) with my landlord via WhatsApp even though she is merely a small Vietnamese lady, probably younger than me. I felt bad when she came here in her pajamas after I’d looked at another room a few blocks south. Ah, but the rain came down in buckets. Like loose leaf notebook paper filled with empty pages, all incidicivse moments that have been wasted through time and flushed out of your armpits … well, now … let’s not get too vulgar here. My vulgar mind, like a side-step into the dark recesses of cameltoe, what? I removed my sweatshirt, wet. It was. Then I proceeded to sit on the floor for meditative purposes. My landlord was nearly in tears, blue pajamas with white polka-dots. She placed her hand over her heart. “I thought I did something wrong,” she said, “I felt hurt about that.” “Yes,” I told her, “I also feel like I am always saying ‘sorry’.” We dreamed together and I farted silently. It was collectively decided that I’d stay in this apartment building. She’d move me to another room for a few nights. Then I could have the front room again, on the fourth floor. She went down and I went back up to my place. I liked this room. It had a lot of light from the mountains and clouds and the reflections of the grayness from raining, raining, raining, raining these past two weeks … that was all right. I put on the Asian news channel. It was a repeat…. Here is issue #16 of EWATIF. Although I haven’t written it yet.
TOADS AND ANCHOVIES yeah, right I read your poetry it sucks it was boring you need a microphone because that’s where your soul belongs toads don’t need microphones they lie dead on the ground completely flattened because somebody somebody ran right over them and I thought about my own death when walking through the rain and seeing the toad’s guts and legs all smashed it made me laugh because that was exactly how I’d felt when I saw you dancing again, your arms in the air balled into polite fists grooving to the music and I was dead because because, man you looked so hot in that red dress of yours, you could kill anchovies, too.
THERE’S A LIGHT ABOVE YOUR HEAD Morrissey was wrong— and I’m tired of waiting on everything to be loading… I don’t need a supercomputer I need a massage, yeah, I probably need a massage I need a massage that has nothing to do with my pecker and I need to stop burning myself out I turn out the light when I’m tired and the room becomes a cloud what if we were just floating through the air, endlessly? floating through the air and vibratory and waiting on wind chimes thinking about front porches where you could sit all day long staring at the passers-by, maybe some kids riding their bicycles to school, laughing skipping stones at a nearby pond “hey,” I can hear a teacher shouting, she’s holding a ruler and shouting down from the sky, talking to kids who don’t care to listen to her anymore they only hear the sounds of the rocks against the water, aren’t they sensitive? I’m in a rocking chair for the rest of eternity I don’t care about electricity or what it means to sometimes need a spoon I take the bowl a hot soup I made with ramen and kimchi and I drink it straight down, red and orange and yellow dribbling down my stupid reckless chin.
A REPORT ON THE END OF THE WORLD Teachers stink. I have armpit hair now. My balls got bigger than yesterday and my dog dangles like a sausage. I’ll probably make eggs and spinach for breakfast at 2:02 in the afternoon. One of the last girls I fucked said I was a kid. I won’t mention the context. It seems pretty immature to do that now. My last landlord told me that Vietnamese girls are dangerous. That made me think of Ray Liotta in Goodfellas laughing like a maniac. It could be a meme. I haven’t been traveling and that’s kind of getting me down. I was in a place for about five months and there wasn’t much light—although there was a back balcony where I could smoke cigarettes. But I’d felt hemmed in there. And before I left I thought about the girls who’d been in my place. The girls who’d slept in my bed. The ways in which I’d been meeting people just for the hell of it because there wasn’t much else to do and work had been slow and then I didn’t feel much like working after spending a year feeling a little depressed because a previous relationship with somebody I adored (and still do) had crashed and burned. These are regular verbs: crashing and burning. They are easy to conjugate, I guess. And that’s what I’m learning to do better. Be easy, man. Yeah. Be easy at the end of the world. I could write about how my late-Italian grandmother used to say stuff like that. From her comfortable armchair. She’d turn to me, removing her face from the news. “They say it’s the end of the world…” “You don’t say…” I’d replied. Scratching my chin. Good. I didn’t have to be responsible for my own future. Maybe I could use it as an excuse? Fuck it. I’ll get drunk for thirty years. No, things don’t work that way. You can reverse time, you can travel through multiple dimensions simultaneously. But you cannot change the collective fate of the planet when mostly everybody around the world is staring at their cell phones. I’ve seen it in an Italian train station. I’ve seen it on the seedy streets of South Philadelphia. I’ve seen it in Northern Serbia, Bratislava, Berlin, Prague, Bangkok, Bali, and elsewhere. I’m not name-dropping. I’ve just been traveling because I figured, what the hell—why stick around and wait on the decay at home? I wanted some action. Today, there’s not much action. And that makes me sad.
I’m built for contentious aggravation on the run, on the move. Most people prefer to stick to one spot, digging their feet into the Earth. And I guess I am not one of those people. I’m more like an escaped convict or a stray dog. I don’t stick to the shadows although that would sound pretty cool, like that Fleetwood Mac song. I have no preferential philosophies that I stick to. Not anarchism, nihilism, humanism. Okay, maybe humanism. But even that seems willy-nilly. I think it would be really cool to sweat it out in an attic room, maybe in Prague. To paint big oil paintings on white canvases while lifting my head out the window intermittently smoking cigarettes. And on weekends I’d take my motorcycle out to the countryside. The world could get fucked for all I cared. I’d care about my art, drinking, being somewhat of a beast. But then politics comes raining down upon me. And I realize that I’ve found my place even though it has left me somewhat disinterested. What I’m trying to say is that I have almost no place in the world. Yet the Earth is my home. That’s what I thought and felt while strolling around the streets of Istanbul last summer. There’s something about traveling and looking out at all the world and seeing more than whatever’s limited by living through a screen or a cell phone. That’s what I’m trying to say. I can see myself getting rid of everything, even more so that what I’ve already gotten rid of: everything. (That’s my mental illness talking.) And I could move to Nepal. For at last three months. For something of a digital detox. But how could I make a living? And therein lies the rub. Shakespeare never had to contend with inflation, stagflation, hypochondria, and a rapidly burning planet … he had his biddies and baes and he wrote whenever he felt like it. It was the 17th century, a new millennium was far away. And he could have probably rented a castle for twenty-five bucks. I find his plays mostly boring, just like most writing these days and modern music is less than thrilling, modern TV deadening and soulless, and what else is there? Destruction or creation. That’s something that has been going on forever and human beings have been corrupt for centuries, if not millenia. I have my doubts. And the ocean here is ripping up the sand and getting closer, inching ever closer, to the street along the sea. There is lightning now. And thunder. Big gray clouds, menacing. And I’ve got a cigarette dangling from my mouth. Where the hell am I going to smoke this thing?