With days to go before the Master’s thesis and my federal income tax due date, I’m feeling that hyper urge to commit all sorts of atrocities to memory, names and places of disasters, birthdays of killers, analyze the instruments of torture. This thesis will be my final mark on the program, the imprint that will last and, with luck and hard work, turn into a book or a collection of poems, the most completely deranged grouping of poems that Temple may have ever seen. I feel like I am doing God’s work, placing good will in the hands of the mad a Wicked sorcerer sent by the Almighty to infuse defecation on the brains of the faculty and student body of Temple University. My readers must vomit filling the tanks of the aquariums with their pain hatred and refusal to adopt a libertine lifestyle. If there were a minor prophet psychosis chriasma then it would be here with me.

What disturbs is that I’ll be staying in this weekend to finish the projects and to finish my taxes. Taxes nudging my legs to action, my money and pocket book to Pentecostal hatred of the unbeliever. I’d feel better with heavier bass and a long haired woman by my side as I poke and prod the IRS looking for its weaknesses and lacunae that young bitter writers with God-complex complexes need to hide in. Being a megalomaniac is the surface of despair. It’s a glass surface with nowhere to hide itself, no cavities to conceal a pistol or a knife. That which has no holes seeks that which has holes. So, no booty calls this weekend. No drug-addled delirium, no mashed potatoes on my chin, cheeks or forehead.

What must be done is to hold and release all my muses. If this writing thing is ever to be anything to me, it must start. Almost a year since Clarion and all that I’ve worked for was lost in fire and in misunderstanding. A Gemini on Gemini bloodbath reinforced by filth fire. Fire was considered a purification process but my fire only muddled my situation even more so. Look at the upcoming Clarion reunion, I’m thinking it will be a good chance to go to East Lansing and claim my old treasures, i.e. my stories that have been archived. All of stories that I wrote and submitted to Clarion are still locked safely away in the vaults of the MSU’s library catacombs. All that need happen is to walk in, open the kingdom and rewrite every mother-fucking word through lenses of Heidegger, Foucault and Nietzsche. All this after a month long trip to Europe where I will hopefully fulfill some other sort of destiny. Stand on the shores of the old country where the Polney family line has toiled in the soil for centuries. Perhaps I’ll bury one of my stories in the ground there, in the liberated Poland.

My dad went under the knife today to repair some herniated disks in his upper back and neck. He went through the procedure with flying colors and is now resting under the gentle hand of opiates resting on clouds of pharmacy’s greatest and most soothing names.


HE WHO LAUGHS LAST, THINKS SLOWEST