I’ll be on my way to see my first Springsteen show in twenty years…

BROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOCE!

Just getting warmed up.

BROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOCE!

NOTE: This is finally getting some attention, so I’m bumping it up. Thanks to Andrew, Lea, Dave K, Skip, and Victor so far. I really need some more advice on it. Thanks.

I gotta say, this is turning into the weirdest piece I’ve ever worked on. It had turned into a full-on text experimentation piece before I backed up and got this. Nowhere near done, and doubt it’ll end up looking like this; just needed some reality checks before going on.

” In a 1971 magazine piece about women’s liberation, Mailer compared the dehumanization of technology to the effect of feminists, who he said were abolishing the “mystery, romance” and “blind, goat-kicking lust from sex.”
— from an Associated Press obituary of Norman Mailer, November 10, 2007

on the night
before Norman Mailer died
in a New York City hospital

a 17 year old boy
was dragged by a friend
to a poetry reading
in a bookstore 300 miles away

finding himself
for the first time in his life
in a room
where he was harmlessly outnumbered
and rendered apparently irrelevant
by
hundreds of women
of all kinds
openly being
all kinds of woman

all he could think of to do
was text a friend
a couple of times

first

they’re singing lesbo
songs

then
after more time
and more poems
had passed
norming
what is maler
he
typed

wtf
i feel mad weird
some of these girlz
r manlier
than me

did he really mean to say

i feel
mad    
romance
mad            
blind
goat-kicking lust

or

some of these girlz r    
abolishing the mystery

or

some of these girlz r mad

Norman Mailer died
a few hours later
unaware of all this
still pugnacious right down to his failed kidneys
he who once stabbed his wife
loathed feminism
boxed everything
typed incessantly

thumbs flying

a boy got up
and left a world
of women
behind
apparently
without hearing a thing

we are all of us
prone to mutter
when someone
is picking at our scars