Justin Holliday
Gen X Lover
What The Living Don't Know
What The Living Don't Know
Artwork by Krista C. Graham, Tears, pen and watercolor
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Gen X Lover
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I need to stop falling in love with so many men
who think I’m special just because they assume I know less about sex and am worth teaching every position they know who remember when Marilyn Manson actually scared parents when I was still listening to the Spice Girls who know that if I say I WANT TO BELIEVE, I’m alluding to Agent Mulder’s office poster on X-Files who can tell me what Tom Cruise was like when he was hot, before he toppled over the couch edge of this side of bat-shit crazy who have drunk so much vodka and cranberry that puking it up is now passé even when more of it lands on their laps than in the toilet who shudder if they hear the word dial, as in dial this number, because it reminds them of the alien invasion sounds of dial-up internet who sigh when they recall how badly they wish they could’ve had the chutzpah to buy Madonna’s Sex book, hidden behind store counters who read Chuck Palahniuk’s novels un-ironically and tell me about throwing M&Ms at the theatrical screening of Fight Club who claim to be the first to denigrate PowerPoint as a lazy teaching method and say that anyone who uses it doesn’t deserve students’ attention who think it’s cute when I say my favorite horror movie is Scream because of its postmodern critique of human consciousness who rub their thighs against me at bars only one no one’s looking because they remember the South too well when sodomy laws existed who tell me my black clothes make me look like I should be reading Anne Rice in a graveyard, not creating a YouTube video about my misery who press their lips against my ear and whisper half-remembered lyrics from Type O Negative’s Bloody Kisses, their eternal stubble chafing my skin who remind me with every gesture, every word that even if I had a PhD in cryptozoology, they’d always know more about the mysteries of the world. |
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What The Living Don't Know
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I’m sick of daily fantasies of my death as if I could prevent anything.
I will not come to a bizarre end like drowning in my lover’s bathwater. Fantasies are the only outlet afforded to most of us, unable to act. The Oedipus complex is not universal; it took Frantz Fanon to figure that one out. It’s a curse that we cannot feel the silk lining of our coffins unless we are buried alive. Nothing is universal when the universe expands as we search for new Earths to populate. Some boys want to fuck their fathers, not their mothers. A grease fire could light up my sleeve, and I could burn like a menorah. If you’re indiscriminate with your sexual objects, you’re labeled pansexual. A hearse is like a limo except the driver can relax because he can’t kill his passengers. Some children who are taught about miracles believe them as adults; others call them delusions. Do all men want to stick their cocks inside every hole they find? The exchange of semen between certain bodies makes life possible and for others, death. I consider the minutes it would take to bleed out if shot in the gut when I watch Law and Order. I can be as reckless as I want with language unless I offend the wrong person. No one pauses and asks if I’m trying to be the next Anne Sexton when I write about death. I can say fuck as much as I want and not be labeled anti-American unlike the Beat poets. Some people are always forgotten by high-school history books. When asked if they know of a poet who committed suicide, most people will say Sylvia Plath. Life is not a miracle unless you can outlast everyone who wants to forget you. Could a man colonize my body but still let me feel at home in my skin? |
Justin Holliday is a lecturer and poet. His work has been published in Lehigh Valley Vanguard, Queen Mob's Teahouse, Glitterwolf, Phantom Kangaroo, Dreams and Nightmares, Lunch Review, and elsewhere.
