the great thing about taking a metafiction class once upon a time is that it has allowed me to feel very clever whenever i pull a where's waldo photo with me in it. 

how perilously close he was to landing head-first on the floor.  

i love my wife, not in spite of the popsicle growing out of her head, but partly because of the popsicle growing out of her head. 

yet another case of corona does its work on a group of 3 people...did they kill the demons the night before next to this bridge? i think mercy is appropriate for those of us who have been bound up so tightly by our self-medication. all we have to do is simply ask. 

wickedly beautiful carnivores in need of a good hosing down

we
we are
we are towering and splendid with semi-shiny white teeth
some of us whiter than others
discrete with our racism
referring to that inconvenient demographic
all of us with the same subtle tone
that tinge when i know that i agree with them
that for some reason it seems like if the news is true
then it really is mostly "people of color" who kill each other.
it must have something to do with that statistic about more murders occuring in the summer, like generations of sunlit skin has mutated the brain...
but to say nothing of my responsibility in this vicious cycle as i pretend to care about third world countries by giving back pats to my humanitarian friends and storing up points in heaven each time a friend risks life and limb in kenya...
i quietly accumulate, and pretend that i don't hate the impoverished for all of the nuisances that they throw my way by walking across the street as i am on my way to a restaurant, and they give me that old feeling of compassion, which is quickly replaced with annoyance, guilt, obligation, and finally a resistance to anything that i feel forced to do, like giving that man my shoes...
this is my indictment of myself, and i know from the time i was brainwashed, two years ago this weekend, that i can hit ctrlaltdel and reset, deconstruct that i might be rebuilt, or that i may be recreated for the joy of the living God...
i may actually start remembering those sweet little words...
i might actually remember that all of us men and women eat, piss, love, fear, get sick and die, and i might think again about how that mexican man waiting in the shade to be picked up and paid cash for an honest day's work loves his family, or perhaps he doesn't, but that i am him, and i am the saudi who is terrified that he is going to be lynched by a redneck caravan.
i am the african man crying in his car thinking his future has disintegrated and i am the african man who has conquered and loved. i have also been conquered by some of the slickest carniwhores as i watched them eat my soul and took pleasure in it, only to cry out to God once more, i am broken and asking you to renew me, and i have a budding hope that i have once more, for the 16,789th time, been reborn as a forgiven and cleansed man because i still believe, and i still am worthy to receive my Christ into my temple.