Amplified Dog

Surrender

39 sUrrender i give up righteous indignation: my clenched teeth and knotted fists. i leap off adrenaline’s runaway train. i give my flak suit to good Will, and throw in the bloody towel. When an acromegalic berates me for preferring “pretty girls,” i ask her out, i spend big bucks on her, i swear to change my life. i want to join the bruise-kneed ranks of the good losers. (insurance men—dump your worst policies on me!) i want to smile at the dmV clerk through his haze of after-shave as he insists there is no record of my car. That explains why i get nowhere. To hell with exercise, the decades’ bench press straining to crush me. i welcome old age like a friend i picked a fight with, and have missed ever since. i give up battling gardeners; i want my trees to look like arrows, fletched only at the top: five hundred times quintuple amputees. pay the blind surgeon, and get him out of here. let mufflers of flab collect under my chin; let arthritis wrap me in its aching rags. i want to come in last, bring up the rear, eat after everyone is served, limp to the end of the line, and like it there. saints, hermits, suicides were right! i want to cash out my accounts and equities, then shove the sum at the first bum who brandishes a misspelled sign, calls me a jive chump, and thrusts a crusty paw at me. let him lug the cement briefcases of solvency until his elbows stretch down past his knees. hand him my good Citizen’s electric boxers with bonus self-recharging batteries, and let him have a big surprise. ...