I pilfer from my Ma

Be patient. Wait for the sound of the shower to die off. If you feel motivated, heave your bony ass out of bed and try to drop for 10. You will get to 7 before your arms give out but that’s OK. Last time it only took 6. If it's piety moving you today, dust of your old King James and read a psalm. Before you, the bible was your sister's and before her, your dad's. Now it looks like it survived a civil war. Last Christmas Ma gave you money for a new one but that morning, Mike and Kathy invited you over for breakfast at the IHOP and you didn't want to look like a chump for not ponying up your share. Ma thinks you bought the bible.

But if things are as they usually are these days, you're feeling neither motivated nor spiritual and you haven't felt either way since that long sleep between high school and college freshman year so stay in bed. If necessary, pull the pillow over your head and try to mellow your matricidal thoughts into something less violent and more non specific. You do not want a fight with her over her morning routines. You did that once, went off on her because she kept flushing the toilet – once, twice, three times, four times – It’s 5AM goddamit. How about you drain the Pacific too.

That day, you discovered Ma had skills, a backhand – a swift back-swing pausing delicately over her left shoulder, and then a reckless decent landing and exploding on your stupefied face. To think you believed backhands were only myth, the kinds of theatric rhetoric people added to threats more as garnish than actual bite. Remember years ago when she told you she played tennis in her high school days? You'd laughed and for good reason - the woman, who took a full minute to ease her considerable mass out of her one-storey SUV, scampering after a rubber ball on a tennis court, was enough to short circuit your imaginative faculties. She made you a believer.

If she’s been in there 20 minutes, she’s probably washing her hair today and will be at it for another 20. Go to the kitchen, to the cupboard where she leaves the garri and her Nigerian spices. Look behind the jumbo plastic bucket of "I Can't Believe it's not Butter" she now uses to store dried pepper. You’ll find that pot you discovered last night on your way to the cereal box. The one with the warped lid charred so badly the metal was flaking. The one she always says she’s thrown out but which just happens to find its way buried under the living room sofa or wedged behind the refrigerator or the oven or haunting every last crook you'd never think of looking in, bearing a tight roll of $20 bills.

As you wet your lips and grin, remember:
one bill and she blames her carelessness
two, she blames the cashier's
three and you're a thief.

Choose wisely

Random Quote

Quote from Edmund White's book

"...but you, I don't think you'd know what to do with a truly big dick except throw it over your shoulder, burp it, and weep. Are you Irish?"

I've been laughing for hours.

Elective: Stupidity 101

Uncle G looks through his rear-view mirror

The weather is so bad. I can't see anything.

I'll go out and look for you

No, no, its ok, I'll manage

I look back and it's practically opaque with fog

are you sure?

yes, yes, it's ok

He's still trying to coerce his eyes into seeing, he cocks his head about looking through the rear-view mirrow

It's just terrible...I can't see anything

Let me go out and look

He ignores me, puts the car in reverse and begins backing out slowly

I hope there's nothing behind me...

He cocks his head about some more still trying to see

Oh God, I hope I don't hit anything

Maybe I should look

No.

I roll my eyes, look out the passenger window and there is a lady, running at us, hysterically waving her arms and mouthing something I couldn't quite hear

What the hell is she doing, he says, still backing up

Then it all makes sense, but it's too late. Fender meets bumper and they kiss...the police arrive, take statements...insurance companies are called and briefed...Uncle G mumbles something about his premiums getting hiked and sulks all the way home. I on the other hand, find the entire thing rather amusing, even hillarious.

A breath of stale hair

I used to wonder why women took so much pains
in trying to be as hairless as possible.

I really did.

Facial hair:
Removing those I understand.
Facial hair is manly,
the human equivalent of a lions mane.

But I thought -
Why do they have a problem with body hair?
the one's on thier legs, forearms, even armpits.
It's hardly anything
or barely something-
which really,
is just splitting hairs.

Well...

Last night at the book store, I saw a 6'3 man in a -

blond wig and high-heeled shoes
and a
poofy-sleeved blouse and knee-lenght skirt
and a
pearl necklace and red clutch purse.

Besides the broad, meaty, quarter-back shoulders,
the one-to-one, waist-to-hip ratio,
his shoebox jaw and side-burns,

he looked decent, even chic - a handsome girl waiting for a date.

Truly a vision
as they say,
to haunt, to startle and waylay.

That was all before I saw his forearms
looked like a furry animal crawled under his sleeves
and was holding on for dear life.

Now, I'm no male-chauvinist.
I'm all for feminists and their cause
and I don't think anyone should be obligated
to look a certain way to be validated as what they are.
But to those women who choose
to shave
and wax
and pluck,

I get it, I sincerly do.

Is it rain or is it snow? I wish the skies would just decide - and when it does I hope it settles for rain.

I though of writing a poem today inspired by the gray skies outside my window.

Something melancholic and nostalgic, something that makes you want to press your nose against the window and wish for summer and sun

or run outside and bathe in the rain like you did when you were little.

So I sat beside my window and leaned in to watch the puddles form in hollows beside the curb and snow flakes melting softly on my windowsill.

It all looked so ripe for a poem

But all I could think of were of idle dreamers just like me looking through glass, waiting to find poetic grace in dim, dull, indecisive weather.

I wonder how many poems have been inspired by rain.

PS: I think I'm going to stop using "lol". I use it way too much. lol FUCK!...starting now...

Thank heavens for little girls. (Long)

My 12 year old cousin came to me yesterday with a sullen almost mournful expression on her face. I was certain something serious was up because she usually greets me like she expects Beyonce to come in right after me, all shrieks and giggles and little in the way of coherent speech and absolutely no self-restraint. One time I got a shoe to my face because on seeing me, she did a high kick that sent her shoe flying across the room, zinging my poor little head, knocking the structure right out of my legs. She's tempered her enthusiasm since then but that only means she's bouncing off the walls now and not the ceiling too. So I took my dearly down-trodden over to the kitchen counter, poured her a glass of ginger ale and asked her to come out with it.

I think my mom watches pornos

What?

I found some porno tapes in my moms drawer

Now, I like to play the big brother. I like to think I can play him well because I've managed to condense all the rules to being a capable adult into one easy-to-master maxim: "above all else, keep your cool" but it only takes a problem, so at peace with its own absurdity to make keeping one's head seem as ridiculous as sipping nails through a straw. I wanted to burst out laughing and I would have if she wasn't taking it so hard. Instead, after silently counting to ten just to keep a straight face, I came up with this deeply discerning jewel of a question:

OK. When did you find it?

Yesterday. I was just looking for where she hid my candy canes - the ones I got for Christmas. I was just looking for them in the drawer because she always hides stuff in there. Can you believe my mom watches them?

I couldn't. I didn't want to. I pictured my aunt inclined in her lazy-boy at night - her blinds drawn, the door, bolted, watching a dirty blond get gang-banged by yards and yards of the hard stuff; the volume turned down to a low whisper and her thighs viced on each other, squeezing out pure ecstasy. It was all too much for me and apparently, for my little cousin too. But even as I found this picture of my aunt somewhat disturbing, the novelty of having a porn-watching (maybe even addicted?) aunt gave the whole affair a tang of coolness. What other secrets lurked behind her closed doors and hidden in her drawers? Whips and chains and leather masks? Blow-up dolls and chain-metal sex slings? The possibilities were endless...but explorable and I figured I'd take my sweet time going over every one of them, but now was for my cousin. What to say?... What to say? ...

Did you watch them?

umm...maybe

She drew out the 'maybe' like a question and I just about saw her innocence buy a one-way ticket back to the pearly gates on the heavenly express, never to return. I felt as though she'd been despoiled, her starry-eyes, dimmed, by her mother no less and yet my emotions -vague but hot, were for the moment directed at her

WHY DID YOU WATCH IT?

curiosity... maybe (again, sounding like a question) I didn't see the whole thing though

Yea, but you saw enough to know it was porn and you kept on watching?

An assumption I'd made up completely out of the blue.

What is it with you kids and your curious eyes? Don't you know enough to leave your mothers things alone?

My voice beginning to rise...

Look, I don't know why that tape was there, maybe it belonged to someone else but it's HER business, it's her goddamn business and I'm pretty sure she'll appreciate you staying out of it. You understand me?

Why are you yelling? She screamed back at me in the audacity only kids born and raised in America can conjure.

Because you should know better.

And with that said, she got up, walked out of the apartment and slammed the door shut behind her. I was dumb struck - what the fuck did she do that for?

It was only this morning after I'd slept off the shock and anger of the night before did I begin to feel the guilt that I had coming to me. Why did I blow up like that? Why was it directed at her instead of her careless mother? I also kept wandering what the right response would've been had I acted rationally. I discovered porn at about the same age so maybe I was overreacting. Maybe we should have laughed it off over Ginger Ale and some cookies but it's so hard to picture talking to her about sex or pornography, icky stuff. It was all too confusing.

I prayed this morning...

Thank heavens for little girls...not so much the bigger ones.

I like being big brother but I'm really making things up as I go along. The more she grows, the more she catches up to me and it takes me - old man that I am , a little while to notice this and adjust accordingly.

We spoke on the phone this afternoon and I apologized for last night. I think she loves me again. The porno talk, that's hopefully on the back burner...for now.