T H U G H L I F E

MARIO LEMAFA #THUGHLIFE

#THUGHLIFE

i chopped onions on a warped cutting board, hands held by a desultory knife, next to a fallen poster of Pulp Fiction men, their guns pointed to the floorboard, no more a threat to anyone but its size a terror, and dog bones and dog torn up shit a surround sound in the living quarters strangled in the formality of straight people here only by Torrented conmen with their tormented paramours "your nothing to me till your everything" -in a living room so FUBAR maxims inspired while i questimated sliced potato ratio to onions that would taste exquisite after the frying pan duty done steam charged phone charged microwave charged i put my feet down in pools of leaking faucet water, Winter-melted snow flooding the basement partly on my mind but mostly that this hamburger beef drained of its fat was gonna feed these boyish men who would have seen war rummage through their twentysomething's twentysomething(x2) years ago an education in reloading magnums & AK47s alack so far from this bitchin' kitchen filled with BASIC auteur theory i watch them eat, the truth watering my size a storm paralysis, like, 251 slack jaw minutes of extended LOTR the chafe of couched entropy in elven entrances ruin to the bone onwardly thinking about my earthly rewards as a prophet in this life at the expense of these disfigured patriarchs

we r electric churches effaced of presence, enslaved by the nostalgia of our forebears who could trace famous vestiges with new age substances & literary canons we r activists pretending the revolution of our beloveds, deprived of Route 66s & comely backpacking in a wilderness that had no Google street view poverty we r chimera cut to three course meal deals, banking on someone elses effortless virtues to save our kith and kin from suburban sprawl and white flight, we r hedonic athletes doin it for the #Vine, these afternoon residues smeared on leggings we r Janus holdin tears down with Kleenex, moral enterprise screaming for drag queens heads whom we marathon on pedestals in the key of Rupaul we r masterful manipulators, clandestinations for each Follower, tangled in tribal markings we r croppers of despair in selfies we distrust no matter how warm screen lights keep us we r old mothers hands on fire, aspirations reduced to confirmation of our written pedigrees, let no child go without the death of their youths in hand, lest you believe in magic, act a fool

we r bark sold in ashes by the bag, ensnared in the rituals of the Hill dive bars we loved proxy to our crumbling bonds, mashed potato shaped exodus of the minted disenfranchised we r not born the ocean we once were, circumnavigating polyamory with sticks and shell maps we r tides seeking a unison in Boiler Room sets, art fairs, burning men, and anime conventions we r made to hear legends and dispel their protective forces, swiftly the millennial effigy goes we r made to give our undivided desires for approval to dead poets we r made to pull from divinity in the excess of red red red notifications we r made to flow these reddened affirmations until something carves its meaning on our tips we r made to spit volumes, swallow the things about ourselves that must b endured

brohorts will never be charmed by these elephants feeling with their callused hands epically, fail there r no Moor bodies in crumbled Rommel like there never was a Calormene's tru life on MTV but there have always been parents casting shadows on their children in service to their addictive fears and they r bound to find the same addiction so i seat myself in a ring of familiar projections, a puppet for tender, a prostitute in a suit tremors Ritalin my body from long court wait's like Valentine's day when i watch the cheated scream their squalid truths out in a hallway so empty as a result of a lie so fetching, we would pay for its grace that we believe this law to bring us out of trenches, yet its punishment digs deeper, sleepless u cant climb to your pathos with a paywall so high u cant dive to the bottom of a Nelnet debt so dense a nondenominational nonconforming nongeneration dances on the table we wrote our devotions in Sharpie's to scrawls of nights remembered in acrid black the floor drinking cheap beer in every language, hands grip on strawberries pureed in every language our boys chey-hoo an island call familiar in mathematics till the tables break, one leg sorry it lost the bet our pups a victim to the gambles the towns r liquor, flooded in their smallness flotsam seeing jetsam, they look like our futures in a karaoke song we've never heard before