I Was Just Thinking About

This poem was originally published in Bruiser Magazine. You can read it here.

The night prior two drunk boys held each other Greco style in the apartment pool parking lot, arms forming a ring over their heads that shifted and turned like a nozzle.

They pushed each other about giving and taking ground trying to get the better of one another, grabbing at each other’s knees.

Through invisible talk they led one another like lovers to a patch of grass and started at the wrestling with some real purpose. They had girlfriends who were annoyed and on phones by the car.

One got a hold of the other’s foot and made him hop on one leg like a punter frozen in time or doing a photo shoot. “Say sorry” the one on two feet said. “Say sorry bitch.”

Today I sit in an office and I think of them while I look at my boss’s dog who has an underbite like Bart Simpson when he does that one face.

She is a fine enough dog, but I get the feeling she’s getting tied up in some inter-office psychology that I’m not sure she would take part in knowingly.

No one else has brought in an animal before. Not even my boss’s boss, Stanley.

Years ago my family had a dog we all really loved who got cancer like all dogs you really love do, and my mom took him to be put down by herself while everyone was at school or at work.

We all knew this to be the correct thing to do and thought it quite brave of her. No one was beaten up about not saying goodbye. You can’t really say goodbye to a dog anyway, we all realized. They never seem to understand what you’re saying.

Three weeks later she bought another dog. She said she just couldn’t take missing the first dog. We all understood and agreed but in the way you do when you have no other choice but to agree.

The new dog was nice and had a dumb optimism I liked but I felt bad that he had to follow such a strong act without even knowing it.

I wonder if my boss’s dog knows what act it is following. I consider what acts I am following and if I’m bothered or worried by them. I’m undecided I decide.

I miss the type of writing that made offices seem so strange and fascinating — textured with the calculated needs of people and how to dissect them to feed the ever hungry market.

Like imagined devices, like electric abacuses on your forearm that you slide about all day tabulating your contentment at various meetings and interfaces,

Constantly sharing the information with a data processing facility in Omaha on the grounds of overall transparency being the best policy, but which will be used against you when you, and everyone else in your department, are eventually fired by some man you’ve never met from the Omaha office who smells acutely of fatherly aftershave.

Nowadays the offices are just nice and you can wear whatever and people have given up on breaking you down with a company culture because they just don’t offer you insurance so what’s the point? And so there’s not much to write about.

Nowadays you just show up and leave and try to write about something else. And that is hard to make seem fascinating.

There are times I wish I was addicted to something more interesting that would keep me out all night and mess my life up in a more fashionable way. But mostly I just sit around blinking.

I knew a guy who had some real demons and he talked about them like that, even saying real demons in a passive but lightly burdened way, like he was scared they would walk into the room at any moment wearing leather jackets, and say, Well look who it is.

That always seemed so cool to me and I knew he sort of got off on it, which I didn’t blame him for considering the aforementioned demons and their realness and their imagined leather jackets. I thought he sort of deserved to get to talk like that.

When one boy finally got a hold of behind the other’s knee he quickly scooped his legs and lifted his friend into the air. “Don’t slam me,” the friend said in the air. “Don’t fucking slam me.”

He, laughing, brought him down gently which was nice but just as he did the once airborne one shot again, picked his friend up and slammed him ruthlessly, and I thought to myself I give this friendship two more years max.

He had knocked the wind out of him.
He had ended the whole thing.