PrettyFakes

The Bill Eggleston book
has a dent in the cover.
The Bill Eggleston book
cost fifty dollars at Lemuria,
maybe.
The Bill Eggleston book
cost fifty or forty dollars at Lemuria, but that was
probably student loan money, forty
or fifty dollars amortized and transmuted
over decades into seven hundred, some
serious long green for barefoot Sallie Mae,
roll the bones, see if you
can come up with anything less than snake eyes
on that one, Mr. Eggleston, eye
saw you breathing and eye saw you
staring out into space.
Turn that lead into gold, grind
fragile egos in that pestle, grind
amateurs beneath yr C-prints and
dye transfers, dazzling with
redhaired girls and two*story tri
clyes and red ceilings, neon
sixtynine on the walls, flashing
Philsopher’s stone over the
faces of Andy & Alex.

And You: You’re Not
Getting Off the Hook.
Yr record is not
getting better as I
sit here and think about Old Bill Eggleston.

I always can’t help but think of his middle-aged man’s penis in that one picture in Memphis keerist why did he put that one in there it’s like when Lewis Nordan put that thing about the sex machine in Boy With Loaded Gun when I guess he was at Millsaps and it made me not want to read about Sugar among the Freaks anymore which is a shame I get that you want to strip away the layers and say this is me but maybe we already figured out who you were anyway without having to hear about all that keerist and when I first saw Office Space and they talked about old balls all I could think about was Bill Eggleston drunk in a Memphis by-the-hour.

you owe me nothing, just like
the song but in reverse, periods between
all the words, an amplified and implied
Minneapolis punctuation,
I.O.U. strikethrough, you’ve
given me so so many
massive nights, and I leaned that
ladder up against the water tower
just like you said, and I raised a toast
to St. Joe Strummer, but dammit
this ain’t all the way there, and I keep
thinking about Tebow and how after
they lost to Ole Miss in ’08 he came on
and swore he do better, that you’d never see
somebody play as hard as him from then on out,
and we never even gave him a dime, and
maybe nobody apologizes for metalmachine music but
this ain’t it, and I ain’t saying you
owe us an apology, but maybe
start thinking about that shit, hell
start writing about what happens
when Tebow meets Charlemagne,
now that’s worth nine dollars at Best Buy.

Left knee pops and I go and stir
the tofu, little chunks after
I pressed it like you showed me how, wrapped in
papertowels & mashed between plates with that
big Beach Boys book up on top, okeh I made that
last part up but a boys got to improvise,
Robt. Downey in the dark alone, gorged
on popcorn and coke zero baby its not a mans world
thats got to be a lie, so long & thx for all the fish
i know la chanson d’une fille de quinze ans, &
there’s no headstone on my grave, O Lake Charles
this little ditty was named after the city where I was born,
don’t tell know-body the secrets eye tole you,
don’t lock the door behind you when you go,
don’t, don’t, Don’t, Keith
Richards in a hotel room in Winnipeg
dreading the worst, tumbling the words
over on his tongue, an incantation
straight from 1956.

O BABY BOY. O BABY BOY. O BABYBOY.

I already made a mistake drinking those two
Cokes at bedtime, but I haven’t quite
managed the taste of diet yet except for
the Doctor Peppers with the cherry.

None of it is a match for
bourbon or Millerlite (one word
screamed over the bar)
but it’s something cold to hold and swirl.

So I’m barely asleep and I mean barely
when the thunderclap jolts me awake,
bolt upright, just like
a horror movie or bad poetry.

The sky was flickering so much
I figured it for police, even while the
little—

Keerist Listen sober poetry before six ayem gets you nothing but cramped thumbs and frustration as yr half-reptile brain struggles to describe a weather app so it doesn’t make you sound so ridiculously bourgie and you really just want to bust Jeff’s chops for being on facebook talking about going on a run at the Rez but you were on facebook too and happy somebody was up except for service industry and burgeoining alcoholics and poets who drink a liter of carbonated sugar and caffeine at bedtime man the poets out here they don’t write nothing at all they just sit back and let it all bleed don’t you want to live with me my best friend he shoots water rats and stop worrying about your car parked under that hackberry already willya Keerist but it was only a seventy percent chance of raining Not Apocalyptic Thunder and Esteem Wrecking at Five Ayem and this queen sized bed is too big for me now and Roy Orbison In Dreams is playing just like a David Lynch movie but you know if there is a motto for poets as the twentyfirst century really gets going like an old VHS aerobics tape it should be no autocomplete, no autocomplete, Keerist no.