A 19-year-old acolyte of E-
lon Musk known online as “Big Balls”
now roams the State Department’s marble halls,
a Tadzio to the Aschenbachian spree
of absurd elders aged past dignity,
hair-plugged, paunched, and jowled, howling at the walls,
whose own grown children rarely take their calls,
desiring feelings once-felt that now flee
across the lovesick waters of a clogged canal—
it does your bidding, but it is a dream—
you cannot re-become a callow youth
by hiring one to bust up the banal
dull business of DC, though it may seem
you can. It’s hot today. You’re long in the tooth.

Nighttime erection data from my 19-
year-old son, and me; his duration
is slightly more than mine, an inspiration
for all those fading fathers who have seen
a belly’s shadow where there once was ween
and who, in some strange Freudian equation
have felt their heartstrings trill toward a relation,
incestuous and weird as Cymbeline.
Immortal pharaohs wed their sisters; we
lie nude, but still apart, in biopods,
like early sitcom couples in their lonely twins,
unsexiest of all perversity,
undead as vampires, infinite as gods.
We mostly want to wear each other’s skin.

Millionaire who wants to live forever
stops taking longevity drug over concerns
it sped up aging. Fewer unhappy returns
in this God-cursed Arcadian endeavor,
sword-barred, Yahweh’s thunder-ordered Never!
Well, every art-collecting attic learns
it: Dorian Gray must turn to Monty Burns,
and what precedes a fall is getting clever
with what is better left to evolution.
Look. At the risk of sounding normative:
you should not use your teenage son for blood.
Vampirism’s not a good solution;
life’s not a vessel; living is sieve,
a fleeting filter in a raged and flashing flood.

The American government runs on Celsius:
a Goop-ified version of Red Bull, with a “Make
America Healthy Again” vibe. Milkshake
Duck in power: he drinks and loves to cuss,
more Triumph of the Will than This Is Us,
a year from frat-frottage at Kansas State,
hungovercaffeinated and often late,
eager to purge the woke, shitlibs, the sus—
his faith is mostly modern alchemy,
powders, proteins, brain pills, beer and weed;
meat-based diet: hasn’t shit in days;
lives in fungal squalor with his three-
to-five feral roommates, avoiding seed
oils—fed on anger, starved of praise.

Having a dense cube communicates
status to women and business relationships;
investors swoon and women wet their lips;
fellas five-at-best bed solid eights;
the Sharks say yes, and QVC awaits;
while other assets have both booms and dips—
one day auto stocks, the next it’s microchips—
a tungsten cube? It just appreciates
you in a way she never understood,
the girl whose dormroom was just down the hall
who football-fanned instead of Call of Duty,
wanted the perfect instead of the perfectly good
you offered. Now she works a kiosk at the mall,
you heard, and you’ve a cube, and she’s a beauty.

Getting into Christianity
because it’s the only way I can quit vaping,
choom mystified like Holy Ghost escaping,
Word made flesh and Dad, humanity.
Quoheleth Jamesified as vanity
had this or that to say about men aping
God instead of meek and modest shaping
of their small lives, thought it was inanity
to pray for pecadilloes lifted by
the hosts of heaven with their hearing aids
turned down; awful angels and the dead
saints and martyrs don’t care, and the Biggest Guy
abscondited already, drew the shades,
and napped. A zealous faith? Try weed instead.

A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,”
or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,
is washed, broke past fixing, and going to hell.
What kind of culture leaves the nerd un-girled,
his adolescent admirations pearled
into a prom-less sock while all the demoiselles
step out with jocks under the sway and spell
of the electric hearth within the heavy burled
wooden nineties TV cabinet?
What Bel-Air princes left their Carltons,
made virtues out of being cool and “fresh?”
America, your ruined children yet
call out for toys and tech and custom guns!
You need more H1-Bs from Bangladesh.

My friends won’t take the subway, and the strong,
young maintenance man in my building finds
himself among those whom the law, well, it binds
but does not protect—he wakes and worries on the wrong
side of the wall the watchman waits upon,
eyeing the watcher through the parted blinds,
imagining richer men and greater minds
are planning more than this panopticon,
its tower crumbling as the land subsides
into the empty aquifers that cooled
the language engines that concatenated
dull prose that duller dimwits used as guides
out of perplexity, and bought and ruled
a country full of people that they hated.

The only people who think I’m “contrarian”
are leftists on Twitter. Everyone else agrees
with me. The holidays from which my family flees
the festive table; not my fault; the Aryan
opinions of my new authoritarian
friends are normal. I am normal. Please
clap. Or don’t. On you. I am at ease
with me as my insistent lapidarian-
lite inscriptions on these lintels of
our online times attest. I’m ordinary.
Many people like me. It is only
Marxists who suggest I cannot love,
myself and that I am a cautionary
tale. I’m fine. I’m fun. I am not lonely.

Luigi Mangione, Sam Bankman-Fried and Diddy
are all in the same Brooklyn jail, per People
Magazine. The glitzed, obsessed, and giddy
press all kneel like pilgrims at the whitewashed steeple
of a new New England church, greatly awakened
to new wondrous sins with which they’ve not
self-sinned before, cold gruel now epic-baconed
to Inferno: pedophile, thief, and THOT.
What angry God had hands enough to sow
such seeds into this dark-soiled furrow?
What mind-surpassing mind could see and know
the crop he’d bear into the singular borough
within whose barb-wired bosom they would come
on the dumbest day, until the following one?