7 | christina continelli

eat sleep kill fuck

 

“…Seems like nowadays, everyone’s driving to Earth Day…”
I sit at the edge of a continent, in somebody’s front yard,
inside a little grey bubble called comfort,
while my friends mill about, drink wine, and curse ‘The Pigs.’

“…no parking to be had, anywhere…”
It is lonely to be surrounded by interesting people,
like going to a whorehouse, and jerking off in the toilet
instead. Surely we must be satisfied by now.

“…but you know you’re in deep shit when the bus driver is genuflecting…”
I have a lover’s adulation of other people’s disgust. Why do our passions
always manifest themselves in minor eclipses and physical violence?
Why does the boy throw the bottle from the overpass?

“…I was listening to Buck Owens and crying…”
vicious & mate gaming & incestuous tourism
It’s SEX like lazy, state-sanctioned cannibalism & sleepy-dry palms lining malachite bays,
and hindsight will always be the spoiler of women.

“…I think I’ll start calling them Hobos from now on. It has a certain retro charm to it…”
Just like Cadillacs, chrome blenders, and the benefits of penicillin.
Exactly one year ago, some crusty guy on Telegraph Avenue called me sister
I resolved to treat him with the same benign neglect as the rest of my family.

“…There are no impoverished Americans, but there are broke Americans…”
Thousands of commercial enterprises fail each year. You will never be rich, never.
Nickels, dimes clink about us like a cadre of introverted perverts,
and I am Queen of the Middle Class, sexless and crowned in paper.

“…Eat, Sleep, Kill, Fuck…”
You know you’re on intellectually shaky ground when you find yourself
using the words “dude” and “parthenogenesis” in the same sentence,
I don’t care how democratizing your education has been.

“…pst. Tell them I’m not here…”
It’s old moons like this that keep the tides from us,
here all drunk and heckle-bowed,
our skulls cavernous seashells in the deep grass.

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christina continelli lives in Oakland with her cat and computer. She is a jack of all written trades: poet, fiction writer, and essayist. She is a graduate of California College of the Arts MFA program in writing, and does all right most of the time.