Just Giving

A half-Jew named after David still speaks the law. After gobbling stuffing and a wild turkey, he’s describing the bird's hunt with a racist brother, outspoken, who owns a long cut of land for an airstrip in Missouri, and he explains to you, after graduating proper and well-early from that Blue Devil school with a degree in economics, that a liberal arts education is only for you to impress people at a cocktail party over all the crab sauce and lunch meat. My parents often put me in his position, and how I should be excellent. Law schooled, I’m sure he’s early over with now. My eyes just still burn at the cream cheese that’s on the coffee table. And you can only extend your boyish reach toward his tight jaw but swerve to the crackers and the butter knife. His sister had died a year ago. She was young and was into dogs and drugs and my brother. My brother cried big tears over it. Or just listened to it.

I feel whole hog guilty about all this.

I almost felt sacred and not guilty later.

Later, your feet standing before the printer at liberal arts school, sweat salt through your socks and fester in on the rubber soul of your canvas shoes, and make you think you’re in fact not God’s dust floating in what scientists surmise can’t just be nothingness. The neo-gothic library laser printer starts to spew pulp. The tear that you cry from your egghead has the yellow refractions. It blind-sides the caverns of your coffee stained teeth, falls into a printer in the neo-gothic library When you’re trying to print off the words of a man who wrote ceaselessly for twenty-two years, as an addendum to a book that serves as his second penis, jams it hard. You’ve downloaded it from a public URL and compiled it in a word document. You read, “Poems Penyeach” by James Joyce.

The yellow tear, refusing to heed to joystick yoke, creeps. Saltwater falls in the seem of white plastic shells, and pauses the ink roller. Jams again. Twelve coeds of all colors and languages pumped up on study drugs beleaguer you with their soft hands, reaching out for the pulp jammed laser busted ink you’re blocking up too. But it’s all suspended. And at least one of the kids, probably a white one, fails a test and a paper, which for him, means no more money from daddy. I went later to judge the pomes. I salvaged that.