“You’ve seen The Hospital?”
This was a small conversation I had the other day. The guy I was talking to, probably in his mid-30s, scoffed. “Of course I’ve seen The Hospital.”
Not of course. Fuck you. I can count on both hands the number of people I’ve met who have seen that movie, and I’d probably still have a few fingers left.
For me, there is no significant joy in being a member in good standing of a movie fan club whose membership numbers are somewhere in the low double digit range.
Family. Cars. Submarines? The DM Film crew reviews Vin Diesel and The Rock's latest Fast and the Furious film, Fate of the Furious, also starring Charlize Theron and Michelle Rodriguez.
Tulips lift toward the sun
not as lips parting,
but cycloptic eyes, self-blinding
to defy dozens of faces
that peer directly inside,
In nature, good and evil do not exist. All actions and events in the organic world follow elemental law, which is to survive despite chaos. Good and evil are constructs of the human experience and relative to situations within that experience. They are value judgments regarding how we perceive situations to be; we make them either of benefit or detriment to our individual interests, ethical and moral frames. The natural universe is morally neutral.
Mr. Butterchips returns for Issue 5 of Drunk Monkeys in nine sharply relevant panels.
I accidently knocked over
the Singer sewing machine,
an old black metal one I found
in a junk store.
The waves are shaped by sirens
and the sea walls built to echo
silence.
Boys, this is what I have wanted to say, what I want to say, all I can say about my folks. It will have to do. You connect the dots. I don't want to or don't know how.
Bamboo and rain drum the time I was a child and my mother was mapping the neighborhood dynasty with her sister Corrine. For years they plotted to overthrow the geriatric mindset of their mother who kneaded Judaism into me and my sister’s Play-Doh.
In 1955, Emmett Till was murdered. He looked wrong. He’d looked at someone who looked wrong. However you’d like to put it. He did nothing.
Then we caught the killers. Wasn’t hard, because there was nothing surreptitious about their murdering. Their motives were loudly proclaimed. We didn’t have a cellphone recording of Till’s final moments, but we had most everything but.
The killers were found not guilty. Free to walk.
“…..I’m a believer in Christ, and I am a recovering sex addict.”
Those were the jarring initial words I heard after I walked into my first Christ-centered twelve-step meeting several months ago, before I had admitted to myself that I couldn’t control whatever had gotten me to this point. Ok, I just have to dwell on those initial words for a moment. A “believer in Christ AND a recovering sex addict?” How is that even possible? What does that mean and how does that apply to me?
Her chameleon eye in the moon
like a crater, and hair falling in meteors
over bare shoulders.
The boy climbed the steps two at a time, emerged into the blinding sun on 59th Street, then hurried to the corner squinting at a scrap of cream colored note paper upon which his father had sketched a map with directions. Stopping in the middle of the street, sweat seeping through his jacket, he got jostled a few times from behind. No one said excuse me, or if they did he couldn’t hear them above the blare of raging car horns. He shaded his eyes, looked across to Central Park South, realized he’d walked the wrong way, then turned around and located the skyscraper with its shiny bluish mirror-like windows.
1. When lifting heavy objects such as art history anthologies or potted ferns, always hinge at your lower back and focus on your groin for energy. These are main components of your “core” and generally the strongest muscles in your body. As you lift your Norton reader it’s recommended you release deep guttural yowls—for self-motivation.
The old dance hall above Radio Shack is crowded, and it sounds like the ocean when I close my eyes. In yoga class, we breathe only through our noses, and I pray the person next to me isn’t smelly as the teacher shuts all the windows and we stretch our arms above our heads.
Forgetting how to swim
was like losing language,
a silencing of the limbs
that once knew fluid
like the vein of a wrist,
the curve of an eyelash
For virtually as long as people have existed and kept records, they have returned to a single question. What does it mean to be human? Moreover, what does it mean to be an unique individual with self-awareness, gender, and a sexual identity? First theater, with the opportunity to portray fictional characters, tackled this question, most famously in Shakespeare’s “To be, or not to be” speech.
Madness is not the only art that consumes.
In our mind, rooms, and in them the scuff
of footsteps and faces veiled in tulle.
Since before we moved houses, that old Polaroid has been sitting there, beside my mother’s bed, for as long as I can remember. I try not to look at it when I walk into her room, the walls yellow with cigarette smoke. And even after she has shown it to me, I can never seem to remember his face.
