when i’m on the clock,
i’ll talk back to a manager
no problem,
if i think it’ll get me anywhere
or not in trouble
or teased by female staff
but i won’t tell the guy
sitting in my reserved seat at the
movie theatre to
move over
please.
some words are too much trouble
for too little reward,
save my father and i getting
what we paid for.
he won’t say anything either.
//wd 12.20.2025
Original photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com.
the Universe
on occasion
needs to realize the limits
of humankind’s existence.
the drunk who calls his girlfriend
a cunt
is still getting the same horoscope
as you or i:
“today you may die,
but if you don’t,
the cosmos is on your side.”
what is that turning point?
giving her one about
moving on.
//wd 12.11.2025
Original photo by brenoanp on Pexels.com.
“…it’s been so long since I did that stuff, I literally cannot remember how we did most of it. […] I really have to insist that we don’t talk about ‘Scanners’, or special effects, or exploding heads…”
– Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg on
Ken Finkleman’s “The Newsroom”, 1996
“The Shrouds” is an 82-year-old artist’s auto-elegiac statement. It’s aesthetically pleasing, and way too talky; its themes cerebral, though defeatist; its characters horny but dispassionate; and it’s told from a sanctimonious perspective that engenders viewer apathy.
My high school friends & I once drove an hour to see “A History of Violence”. We walked in late to the screening after getting a parking ticket, and immediately after the big 69’ing scene (but before the diner shootout). We didn’t find out until much later what else we had missed.
[cont’d]
the father
had heard
and seen
everything the boy
had ever thought;
had done
and said –
that’s what the low-budget documentary
on Amazon Prime told him.
it was all outlined
in a big ULINE box with no lid
full of labelled duo-tangs stacked the wrong way
on the top shelf –
no less important than all the rest –
to whom the spirits kindly regressed.
the father didn’t necessarily ask for all this.
all he did was ask
and he was met with
and where maybe once he permitted himself to forget some things
based on nature,
his age,
now he knew everything.
that was the curse of the dead
and their wistless blessing
i’ll have the news on to catch the top stories
but after a few minutes it’s purposeless –
they’re all the same bullet points from yesterday
through a perspection of passing time:
some people died
and one famous about to;
displaced persons from a camp removal;
one’s a terrorist about to be tried;
another one biding to be penalized;
global warming at an all-time high;
random attacks on the rise;
car pile-up on the ninety-nine…
by then all i feel is empty inside:
it sounds like a Saturday night of gaming
than a generation’s place in humankind.
i put a CD i’ve heard a thousand times in the drive
that doesn’t come standard with new models of that type,
because i’d rather hear Morrissey whine
than to face my own materiality of being alive.
when my world ends,
i don’t want it to be from a shot to the head
or an environment that kills me in earnestness
or even just peacefully laying in bed:
theory of a daskeman 