from tedious to wildly overblown to kind of fun

Seth Simons

an @NYTMinusContext cento

a lot. Too much I can’t tell anyone normal about this
It’s a car and you can’t drive it It’s just another bird
until you pray for it the hugeness of the thing
is a problem

do you want me

to tell you the one about that horse who walks into a bar? staring
into a mirror, the distance, what have you unexceptional humans
slouching perhaps eating, perhaps screaming so, so anxious — always
worrying reeling from repeated rejection lacking in their existences,
tenderness ordinary human awfulness glued together by nonsense

evil, almost

It would be really nice if there was a way to feel human-shaped and sad inertia
or confusion or both isolation, drowning, the moon, the color blue someone
who is cold, maybe even too cold neither quite wild nor quite sensible
enough mostly a desert of strangeness an aching silence and a vision of the future
as a void hated — truly hated maybe joking and maybe not

For weeks, I moped

Eating Pringles in bed high in the morning and drunk at night thinking, yeah, art,
beauty — my meat, drink and air a ludicrous figure, rummaging about, snuffling
around all manner of ghoulish misbehavior and grotesqueries cleaning
and trying not to go crazy the world’s least interesting and dignified kind of person
Oh, dread, I remember you we could turn the world off, then on again, in an attempt to reset it

ghost, dear ghost

you can stop lying An ancient evil has been unleashed upon the world I’m fine
holy cow This is the best thing to ever have happened if you can, forget about everything
love, grief, mental illness What is the moon for clouds, blue, sunlight candlelight,
fires, fuzzy knitted socks, porridge, coffee, cake your brain can only take so much of this
to loneliness and darkness, to the slivers of dread being dazzled. That would be nice

who wants to hear some jokes

© 2019 Seth Simons

=====

Seth Simons is a writer and editor based in the Bay Area, where he works as a journalist covering the entertainment industry. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Fugue, Red Wheelbarrow, Breakwater Review, and Conduit.