that I had never heard the term “fapping” as a euphemism for masturbation?

The new Zero Point Zero column is posted, in which I urge poets to stop writing so much.

 
The Zero Point Zero Regular Column!

Very much more than Nothing!

I walked toward the drugstore door
where a skinny man
in a worn green plaid shirt
and dirty bagged-out jeans was standing
unsteadily near the trash can.

“You don’t know shit,” he said,
after catching my slight recoil at the way
he spit large into his palm
and ran his hand through his hair
to flatten the strays that had come loose
in the wind. “Don’t look at me like that, fucker.

“Nothing works better than spit
on my hair. If I wanna
spit in my hand and wash myself all over with it,
why the fuck should you care? We’re all fucking animals, ain’t we?
How’s it any different than what a cat does,
or a dog? And are you gonna tell me you wouldn’t lick
your balls if you could? Course you would.”

He lurched away from me
into the store on whatever errand
had brought him here. I stayed the hell away from him
once inside, where I picked up my prescriptions,
bread, a lemonade for the ride home.

I almost hit a stray cat
before entering my street. He scooted across the road
and sat down once he’d made it and started in to licking upon
his matted white fur. I watched him for a while
before getting out to go inside.

I have been thinking about them for a long time now,
that drunk and that fleeting cat: their quick wet swipes
over their hair, maybe lingering for a moment or more
on some part that feels good, trying to cover up
how frightened they were by the close approach
of what might have been death, might have been scorn,
might have been an assumption that survival
isn’t enough by itself. We’re all animals,
he said. We just do what we do.