Flood-Pants Confessions
from Pesky Suburbia

by Sean Kilpatrick

My face, like micro-waved pasta,
shook into the polished room
where everyone sipped chi
with the unrushed gumption of delicate urgency.
She sat, her usual shoulders hunched,
talking to another pristinely sculpted human,
except maybe he was willing to turn bright red
under her sheets, or anyone’s,
and vainly, I could assume, or hope,
although she was laughing.

So pleased by this, to suffer publicly,
my own smile whipping up
three flights of cheek.
She noticed my glowering
countenance, many tables over.

You could see her skull with the light above her.
And the teeth from inside its skin were frowning.

I laid every pack of sugar across the bar.
Counted them and screamed the number.
Yelling also how I bought a jeep
with her name on the license plate.

She knew me.
Her _expression was a chastisement
of my selfish childhood,
the masturbatory vulgarity
of my insistent (and accidental) misuse of language,
my innumerable psychological weaknesses,
and many other problems too subtle for me to explain.

“I am just another thing you wanted
to lock in your toy-chest. I will not be obsessed over
by some infant wearing a tuxedo.” She said.

It was another goddamn boot flattening my throat.
I yelled this too. They stood. Leaving,

to go home. So he could fuck her there. Any place he held her was home,
and they stopped in the doorway to smile back, to let me know, even though
I was convinced her cunt was tighter than an anthill and more painful.

I drank my cream soda, bunched up in the corner.
Adjusted my tie, crying.
Drove home, traffic wasn’t bad--
only one cop car followed me.
Later that night I stapled my socks to my feet.

I felt like eating a bar of butter and telling you about my sex life.
So I wrote some poems and got fat.
They were pretentious cum drops of gibberish.
Writing, I felt like a politician or a wrestler.
People have infused those two anyway.

Then I wanted to play a little card game or something.
Shove a pen into the cat’s stubborn anus.
It was a typical Thursday.

Suicide reminded me of fucking, technically improbable.
Not worth the end result.

Suddenly, the phone rang. It was my mother. She was crying.
“OHH, ARE YOU OKAY! I’M SO CONCERNED FOR YOUR WELL-BEING! PLEASE, DON’T SOB! IT CHARS MY COLON!”

I screamed. She hung up.

There was a knock at the window. It was my friend,
but I couldn’t remember his name. He came in and got a beer from the fridge.
“MAKE YOURSELF COMFORTABLE!” I screamed. “BECAUSE YOUR FRIENDSHIP MEANS THE WORRLLD TO ME! WE’VE KNOWN EACH OTHER SOOOOO LONG. THERE ISN’T ANYTHING I WOULDN’T DO FOR YOU, MY GOOD, CLOSE FRIENNNDD!”

He decided to leave.

I heard the mail slot clank. I ran outside and grabbed the mailman.

“THANK YOU FOR DELIVERING MY MARCEL PROUST COLLECTION! I KNOW IT WAS REALLY REALLY HEAVY, METAPHORICALLY AND PHYSICALLY, BUT YOU’RE SOOOO FUCKING STRONG, AREN’T YOU!”

He punched out my teeth, put them in an envelope, and handed it to me. At the dentist, I cleared my blood sick throat.

“YUR SUK A GRAY DENNIS! YUR LIKE DE BESS DENNIS IN HAR-RER WOODS! I TINK I FUCKUN LUBE YOU!”

He drilled new holes in my gums.
I thought his assistant was cute and wasn’t paying attention.