Narcolept in surgery
on the table flat lined year
Injected topical, a
single tear and the scalpel slices gum tissue
Overhead projector
for a nine thousand dollar three hours
To crack a jaw,
hammer teeth and remove the work of sixteen years ago
Three implants and a
fourth tooth root canal removed
Quartered smile
sequestered behind the idea that it has not been real
Since third grade,
lumber, bike, and face
Blood a classroom
after two weeks not wanting to walk in or smile big
Explain that I felt
like it was my fault, Catholic school rim of desks
Went outside the
boundary of providence and busted permanence
Intentional behavior
beyond the domestic standard
So that in eighth
grade in a fight to not throw a punch
To have the weakest
in the triad dislodge in a week on New Year’s Day
Spit out and
acknowledge retained learning of how to defend one’s self under god
Of what one is told
and does not do to obey and seek redemption
In quiet and
notebooks and blue carpets and red glob spit
Dunked in milk, grass,
and denture cleaner
Nail fungus and
braces tightrope walking placeholder
Straight aligned and
long term thinking
Ramones one, two,
three, four punk suburban brain
Percolating college
implants as a finish line for mouthing the metal
Eruptions and
failure and ripping out and looking in the mirror near forty
And feeling like the
monster an ex-wife spun and daughter shuns
A gaping hole and
fangs, blood and cadaver banked bone
Sterilized to insert
and rebuild to have me readied to drill in again
Put more metal in
me, improved technology cyborg zombie
A year from now
after this surgery, six months, and six months after healed enough
To be picture ready
and for now I don’t want to wear the partial
The temporary or
whatever the fuck you call this plastic tray four toothed sham dish
Gums are swollen,
sliced and raw and the pressure of it is more pain
For what;
appearances for the folks at work on the street as if I don’t sound
Like a failed
whistler or could frighten children beast style if given the sidewalk
Whatever; it’s just
a stupid modern mime about body parts insignificant
Something punk in
not wearing frontals that makes me a bit happier
Missing yoga with
the fatigue, amplified by the not sleeping kind of sucks though
Staying up staring
at pillows or computer screens
Eating around
anything that requires biting
Sipping season and
mashed carrots, library audiobooks, and online matrix
Water the rosemary
and clean the turtle shit
Driving two hours to
a meat plant and watch the boxes of animal skeletons
Men slice blood and
cow legs and ribs crack
Heads in slaughter
closet in Nebraska away from here by eighteen wheeler
My thoughts are
about barcodes and accounting, scan guns and documenting
How not to fuck up;
staring at an atheist’s god
Wanting there to be
something more than these books I’ve written
Hours scribbled and
texts to a daughter who randomly answers
With her trying to
figure out twelve and for all these black hole reasons
I am banished from
participating how or where I want
And the word family
feels like a third grade classroom
Wanting me to piss
my khakis or slam my smile into a cubbyhole snuff film
Repeated until a
custody trial questions why I don’t enough
Or I worry I am
recycling Freudian desire to have my old life back in some trap
The fear of the
surgery was coming and I felt time shortening
Pressure of wanting
family and god, wife and child
To go back to a
place of pain in a masochistic torture drone camera lens
Because venturing
out has brought so much rejection
Question the
questioning, the odyssey and wanting it to end
In some enveloped
pointlessness, wanting to not exist like fifteen year old suicide
Joking on sidewalks
summarily rejected digging through grass for missing pieces
Plugging holes with
whatever is found nearby wind picking up blades
Green and red and
dirt and a sky god obliterated and resurrected
In answerless
answers to a thirty seven year old man lying on a surgery table
Asking to be drugged
with laughing gas and the doctor forgets
And I lie there and
take chisel and pay to have teeth whacked
Arms prone and
refusing to budge allowing the confrontation unabated
Like a good boy with
his obedient tongue and gnarled silence
Wheeled out in a
chair to his mother, rolling home to the empty stairs full of pictures
In the illusion of
space hoping the exhaustion will allow the pillow, sleep
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