The Dead Eat Everything

Elegy on Old-School Drum Machine

53 e L e g y o n o L d - s c h o o L d r U M M a c h i n e today, i’m cold sweat swagger like cruising Franklin avenue with the windows down and the heat on, bumping a mix cd that goes Prince, The Last Poets, John cougar Mellencamp, Prince. i got a four-finger ring that says doPe, and a bag of cheeseburgers riding pistol on the passenger-side floor. i’m going the way of fake-fur coats and salt-stained gloves. The boots i wear were my dad’s. i almost always keep them untouched in the corner of my overpriced studio apartment, but not today. today, i’m a slick rick song about russian mystics, a single bone i dug up in a friend’s yard as a kid. There’s a bus stuck in the snow. There’s a high schooler wearing basketball shorts in the cold, trying to impress a girl and failing, and that brings me back, hard, like the fatherly smell of leather. Where’s the parking lot where we used to play the dozens, OHHHs steaming out our mouths like clouds? Back then, i had a homie who licked a frozen gun on a dare, once, and got his tongue stuck to it, and he did it again another day for fun. The same guy—years later, same self-inflicted haircut—dances around downtown every Thursday at 5pm, flailing his arms like a don Quixote nightmare, and responding, whenever a stranger asks him what’s up, don’t you feel it, too? ...