Lodestar Quarterly

Lodestar Quarterly
Figure reaching for a star Issue 2 • Summer 2002 • Poetry

Colon: Right Parenthetical)

Shane Luitjens

You think you can bring that in here like it don't mean a thing.
Like you got the world on your shoulders and it don't hurt.
Take this Monday morning and all its cups of coffee
and find a special mouth for it to fill.

Oh, I know people like you.
Coming into the room with that that bad attitude.
That terrible and abstract bit of teeth showing.
Yeah. You got a positive attitude problem.

No one wants to hear that you had a good day.
There are children dying
and small animals being run over every hour.
In fact, three squirrels were squished
in the time it took you to pen that smiley face
over your initials. Colon. Right parenthetical.
I think you're cool. Colon. Right parenthetical. Whassup?
Colon. Right parenthetical. I kiss you. Colon. Right parenthetical.
Whassssup? Colon. Right parenthetical. Have you seen
the hamster's dance? Colon. Right parenthetical.

I know you think you are helping.
I know you think you have something you can contribute.
I know you would like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.

But I didn't ask to work with hamsters and I don't want
to tell you my favorite food, my birthday, or watch my neighbours.
I don't want to pass this on to ten of my friends.
I want the bad luck, the disease, some computer virus.
I want to halt the revolution and delete Britney's boobs.
I want my life to be filled with anarchy, poverty,
and a smaller, angrier penis.

There are a million clouds in this sky and not one is having a nice day.
We are all completely unhappy and angry
and you are trying to ruin that with every goody goody thing you do.

Oh the world is full of hope.
Oh the world is full of happiness.
Oh the world is full of babies.

Well, I hate hope and happiness and babies?
Babies? I sold three just this morning to
several Iranian banditos who fire them out
of weapons on small third world shanty towns
where the people cook their shoes
and it the heat never gets below 3000 degrees
so they have to stop breathing and they can't just die,
but lay there miserably,
heart beating,
breath like steel,
and only they can understand the kind of suffering
I have to go through in any given day. Double-click.
Day. Double-click. Day. Double-click.

Like today.

Shane Luitjens, a.k.a. Torque, is a 27-year-old writer/designer/photographer living in Boston whose written work has appeared in the Lambda Awards finalist Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology, Periphery, Anything That Moves, and many other literary and art publications. His published collections include Assaults on the Marathon, Blood for Wings, and Every Ineloquency. He will be appearing in an upcoming anthology of queer slam poets and the online journal, Suspect Thoughts. Currently, an award-winning senior designer for Monster.com, he is also director and founder of the national grassroots project HOOK, a program by, for, and about men in the sex industry. More information on design and photography is available at Torquere Creative, and more information on his writing and other artwork at LethalWhiteTrash.

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