See asterisk commentary below for why I am now redacting my photos. TDLR: perpetual infants get perpetual frost
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*An old poem that I have been tinkering with over the years—and today with some big changes.
*In league with anti-art humans (the canceler scum gremlins among us)—now we have faggot AI scouring my platforms to flag things that might upset “vulnerable populations.” For that reason I have chosen to treat everyone as infants, bot and human alike. I will frost all my photos—which, in an illiterate world of TikTok’s infinite jest, is all that matters anyway.
On that point, it just blows my mind that people who lack the firepower to read the sheet music of my syntax have any say over literary art. I want to say, “Isn’t that wild? Doesn’t that blow your mind?” But am I even speaking to someone who respects the word—or who can even fucking read? Jesus Christ!
What is even worse is that—AND THERE IS RARELY AN EXCEPTION TO THIS RULE (so watch what the fuck you say to yourself)—the people most offended by transgressive literature, literature that explores the darker things of which humans are capable—those motherfuckers are the secret diddlers of our beloved children and pets.
Let me make the rule clear for the spastics among you: THOSE WHO ARE THE MOST VOCALLY DISGUSTED BY TABOO SUBJECTS ARE OFTEN THE ONES STRUGGLING WITH THOSE EXACT SAME IMPULSES. There is a corollary to this rule: THE MORE YOU ARE CALLED TO REPORT (CENSOR, SILENCE, SHAME) THE ARTIST FOR HIS OR HER TABOO SUBJECTS, THE MORE LIKELY YOU ARE, IN FACT, STRUGGLING.
Look at all the anti-homo preachers. Look what they are about. Look how they get methed-out just to make it fucking last all night like Tom Petty. Fucking heartbreaker huh? Don’t think you are an exception.
I have your number! And I will not stop calling you out. I will not stop poking holes through your veneer of respectability, your calls for “safety.” Give me a break! I know what your “I’m triggered” and “I’m offended” means. It is as see-through as a toupee, as an oversized watch. You are overcompensating.
Nah. That lets you off too easy. Your “I’m shaking right now” is as see-through as tinted windows on a “family” van. You are performing a burlesque of virtue to hide the rot—perfect for a Kardashian world: plastic, shallow, performative.
You cancelers are the dark souls. You ban me, the mirror holder, because you are disgusted at yourselves—because you know what the fuck you are into, you lying scumbags. It is a tale as old as time. The poet shows you as the pigs you are. If we were not all set for obliteration anyway, I would never cast my pearls at you. Hawk tuah. I spit on you cunts.
Don’t ever project your sick fantasies on a person shedding light on the dark. Report yourselves. Not me. You are living nightmares right out of Orwell. And you lack even the basic humility to see it.
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"AA Meeting" is a poem about the unexpected salvage of human contact — specifically, about the moment when an act of irritated intervention becomes, against the speaker's will and intention, the thing that keeps them in the room and brings them to speech for the first time. Its fourteen lines move with the compressed inevitability of a sonnet without quite being one, arriving at a closing image of such quiet power — the hand that does not let go, the voice that finally speaks — that the entire preceding architecture of irritation and escape-planning is retroactively revealed as the necessary condition for the breakthrough it was trying to prevent.
The poem opens in sensory agitation. "That hand kept fidgeting metallic ratatats / too broken, too shifty in accent, to stand" renders the neighboring AA member's nervous movement in percussive, synesthetic terms — the sound of knuckles on a chair rendered as metallic, accented, broken. The speaker's irritation is immediate and physical. "Knuckle staccato, pings of tinnitus tinsel" is the poem's most formally inventive line, the alliteration mimicking the very sound it describes, the "tinnitus tinsel" suggesting both the neurological persistence of the sound and its decorative, almost festive quality — an irony that undercuts the annoyance. "Like the brainstem scrabblings of squirrels / in a drown barrel from my lost garden life" is the poem's most unexpected image, locating the sound in the speaker's own past through the specificity of "lost garden life" — a whole domestic world condensed into a phrase, its loss unnamed but present in the adjective.
The speaker's response — scowling, grunting, failing to catch even the corner of the fidgeter's vision — is rendered with self-aware comedy. "My dirty looks, grunts too, / failing to pull even the corner of his vision" places the speaker's social aggression in its proper scale: entirely ineffective, unnoticed, the performance of irritation for an audience of none. The speaker is on day seven of sobriety, which the poem places with deliberate casualness — "merely sober day seven" — the "merely" doing the work of enormous understatement. Seven days is not nothing. Seven days is the entire duration of the speaker's new life, and the poem knows this even as it pretends not to.
The pivot is the poem's formal and emotional center. "My own hand darted out" — the verb "darted" is exact, capturing the involuntary quality of the gesture, the hand moving before the mind has authorized it. The speaker reaches out to still the fidgeting hand, an act of irritation that is also, in its physical directness, an act of contact. "The whacko / rudiments stilled against the chair" — even the language of the stilling carries the speaker's characteristic defensive mockery, the "whacko rudiments" framing the gesture as absurd even as it performs something genuine.
"Eyes / in the circle converged on the touch" — this is the moment the poem has been building toward, and the convergence of the group's attention on the two hands in contact is both embarrassing and, in the AA context, exactly right. The circle sees what the speaker cannot yet acknowledge: that contact has occurred, that something has passed between the two people, that the boundary of the speaker's defended isolation has been crossed.
"What / better excuse to walk out, to mainline back / to oblivion" — the escape route is immediately available, and the poem names it with the specific vocabulary of addiction: mainline, oblivion. The touch has created a crisis, an exposure that the speaker's every instinct wants to flee. The "what better excuse" construction is the speaker's characteristic irony turned against itself: the very conspicuousness of the moment, which makes it maximally uncomfortable, also makes it maximally impossible to dismiss.
"But his hand did not let me go. / It squeezed." — the turn on "but" is the poem's quietest and most powerful moment. The other man — whose hand the speaker has just gripped in irritated reproof — does not pull away. He squeezes. The gesture is not explained, not contextualized, not preceded by eye contact or speech. It is simply physical — one hand holding another, the grip tightening. In the AA context, this is everything: the recognition of a fellow traveler, the wordless communication of solidarity, the refusal to let the speaker's aggression define the encounter.
"And I spoke for the first time." The final line is the poem's most formally restrained and most emotionally complete. The speech itself is not given — we do not hear what the speaker says. What matters is the fact of speaking, the breaking of the silence that has presumably characterized the speaker's first seven days in the circle. The hand that was gripped in irritation becomes the hand that held the speaker in the room long enough for speech to become possible.
The poem's fourteen lines and its implicit sonnet structure — eight lines of problem, six of resolution — are doing formal work that mirrors the AA meeting's own structure: the accumulated weight of individual stories creating the conditions for breakthrough. The turn occurs not at the conventional sonnet's volta but at the physical contact, the dart of the hand, after which the poem's emotional logic becomes inevitable.