Megan Volpert's freshly alphabetized pets! |
by Megan Volpert |
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any secrets can keep to infinity as long as they aren't my own camus, albert there against the desk door chair and your lover is ringing ringing they always want to have me over listen don't invite her for dinner one drink more won't kill you i am a wolf in wolf's clothing don't ask how many members of my thesis committee i fucked any secrets can keep to infinity as long as they aren't my own you think this is chocolate cake i am the proverbial empty shell you think i want you to fill me but i make you an empty shell pressing my up against your my body is a slow rifle every professor is game oh frosting you like that even though i leave you screwed bleeding troubled i haven't taken any pedagogy courses though i do teach them the hard way a sickness with the sun in your eyes where everyone hopes to judge you pausing first to zip up their trousers chomsky, noam there is nothing more glamorous than an aging bored dominatrix cixous, hélène i once gave my principal a really scathing semester evaluation they were supposed to be anonymous though any student could easily recognize my handwriting jackass never came by my class to see it six months later he referred to my brutal commentary in meetings and attributed the remarks to a math teacher surprise surprise when next fall we had hired a new math teacher though the first one got great student reviews in seventh grade i took a drafting course that changed my life say what you will about pretty faces that may be what landed you the job you were looking for but penmanship is how you keep it some people would simply not have written such nasty criticism and none of those people are me during the course of my childhood it was revealed that woody woodpecker was voiced by a woman which i felt very intensely as a kind of betrayal instantly transforming woody into medusa laughing this is also my first inkling of what the closet means and how disturbing it is when something pops out of one because my happy happy cartoon world was infiltrated then shattered by the suddenly gay warner brothers agenda the wrench of polymorphous perversity jacked up the cogs of my consciousness initiating me into the squeaky wheel club where i’ve messed with admin ever since there is indeed much to be said for bucking the man’s language but if instead you discover a queer ability to proficiently speak it de beauvoir, simone when i sigh i wish we had known each other she cinematically protests she is ugly in love such an offhandedly deft render of annie hall it is impossible to say she was only kidding looking up vaguely under the direction of her pointed finger outside a second hand store with shabby hats in the window i am standing on a windy corner somewhere in new york city we drop it and my thoughts fly to cimetière du montparnasse remembering how i left two business cards on their one tomb so jean and simone don't bicker over my contact info in hell wherever this angelic duo of existentialism resides i hope they are a safe distance from the badgering the how often did they fuck and was she a lesbian folded away under a legacy of good work together de certeau, michel i took out eighty thousand dollars in student loans so that when everything i write omits capital letters people do not think of me as an ignorant hippie type but as a willfully detached and pretentious intellectual it's amazing how schooling can elevate simple aesthetics to the level of a serious political argument and real strategy even while school itself thinks of me as grossly unprofessional unable to map how deeply i took advantage of what it had to offer also toward this end i spent a lot of the loan money on a trip to paris climbing all over historic artifacts that infused me with a profound sense of not giving a damn about anything i can't relate back to my own self-worth poaching from the territory of rules what i need to carve out my own constellation the loans have a very high fixed rate of interest but then so does the poet who spent this money |
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