Gonzo Domestic Squabble (ROUND 5)
scent of the day: Nose Rest Day
*Let’s workshop this poem about a college student's secret intervention in a courtyard dispute that triggers a psychological regression into the childhood trauma of being pelted with his mom's squirt.
*Worked on every stanza.
Gonzo Domestic Squabble
Drunken shouts tied into a sloppy knot in the grass. I moaned in my dorm window. The girl—tit flopping in halogen butter—took the mount, grunting berserk hammerfists to his skull. But he got hold of her hair. They had a life. Hyperaroused helplessness had me gleeking that unforgotten brine—my mouth, pickled numb, raging to retch. Electricity tingled my pinkies like in childhood. I needed in on it, in on their union, like when my mom and her men fought in a fuck coil fecal with the piston of a glucking fist, her shark eyes dead to Teddy and me—as far as a child could know, the sugar of the verboten still locked in cookie jars. A nonagent, less than zero—I felt alone. I felt my way in afterglow black to the kitchen where my suitemate, out on another date, kept his pest control loaded. I pumped the air rifle, an edging pace. I bore a hole in the screen, sweet time, for its tip to retake control.
As with my mom and her men, my need to inject more fury—myself—into the chaos was an ache righteous because I mattered nothing to them—because pain and injury, they should know, come with the territory. Lured by the homecoming prospect that I might rise out of oblivion, that my intervention might make one body purple the other back into oblivion (proof as to whom mastery belongs), my squinted aim held despite the upheaval pounding through the carotids. Female shrieks, so familiar, followed the BB strike. Bodies punched for air. Spurred by my sting, the man took his mount with headbanger chokes that bloodied my lip. My cock tried leaving me like when her squirt pelted Teddy and me—sheets of deadened thuds, rug in a cloudburst—with that musk of hot pennies saltier with my tears. “Mommy stop! Mommy!” I could smell her, her bowels. I pumped, past ten. I took a third shot.
Voices from other windows in the quad heckled them and I took the fourth shot and then the fifth, no longer caring to cover my noise or even the mirror it raised. I pumped again, those vinegar clacks—clack, clack— I knew from many semesters had to have ricocheted against the brick. But some ring in my ears, an angel, tunneled my attention. And I shot. My soul, my cock, needed him to forget her need to breathe. That too felt familiar. “Ah!” he yelled, holding his face in response to the hands now pulling the strings—my barrel out too far like when I let go of Teddy to suck her nipple in goo-goo-gaga, my bodyweight in her knee hollow relieving her arm, as she re-blew: lowing like a cow in oniony estrus, sweeping my hand across the blub; plop-plopping it down. He kept uppercutting her gut even though she was done. I could see the fist outline, belly heaving from within—the girl sobbing like her.
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
