MAYBE WE'LL CHILL AT HOME OR GO SEE THAT LEMURS OF MADAGASCAR MOVIE MORGAN FREEMAN NARRATES

written while reading Lauren Ireland's Dear Lil Wayne, Jeff Alessandrelli's The Last Time Will Be the First and emailing with Sampson Starkweather

People want things to end
but not really
Not, like, forever

Go down on history, I say
I mean, in

Go
different ways

*

My horoscope says
The options are limitless

The dude sitting across from me looks nervous
for a priest

Disheveled too
All up in it

*

There are these memories I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with for years. Like when I was a boy out looking for things to shoot with my bb gun and saw a baby bird in a nest in the rafter of our barn with its neck stretched out, mouth open, waiting for its mother to return with food. I shot it. Its little cheeps slowed then stopped, as if merely its batteries had run down, and I turned back to the house to pretend it never happened.

Some juvenile ancient mariner
shit right there

*

I get caught up
in futile things

Empathy is not
an instinct

Anger and destruction are easy

No one paying attention
to me

*

The word of the day is yokel

Is slovenly

Is one of those days where I love
every god damn thing about my life

The nun I just saw
Disembarking from her chauffeured Denali
(Autocorrect changed my spelling of chauffeur to Chaucer)

*

That was a slice of heaven is the last thing I remember my grandmother saying. Alzheimer’s had taken most of her ability to speak. Before long, it took it all, though she would still struggle to say things, to form a word and put it in the air. The thought was there. Clear. You could see that much. Then it was gone. This did not end until her life ended.

*

There’s the general meta and then
the personal meta

This is not the personal

This is
a beautiful day at the zoo

*

The only way I know to write is to read
What I like about that is the different words I get to use

Funeral wreath by the side of the road

The murkiness
of who or what it is
I’m praying to

*

Setting up identity, says the computer

The papers are just props, says one of my tweets

Bye
Sorry
<3

Justin Marks' books are, You’re Going to Miss Me When You’re Bored, (Barrelhouse Books, 2014) and A Million in Prizes (New Issues, 2009). His latest chapbook is We Used to Have Parties (Dikembe Press, 2014). He is a co-founder of Birds, LLC, an independent poetry press, and lives in Queens, NY with his wife and their twin son and daughter.