You may notice that none of these works were ever formally published as poems. I consider them poems because they have an artistic quality to them and one day I hope to be able to recite them from memory.
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Here Are True Facts About The CuttleFish:
The cuttlefish is not a fish. It is a mollusk of the class cephalopoda.
The cuttlefish is a bit like a clam that millions of years ago came out of its shell and never went back.
In fact, it still has a specialized shell, but on its inside,
which is used for buoyancy and is called the cuttlebone.
People for a long time have used this shell to carve casts for metal jewelry.
These people are called "cuttleboners"
by me
and now, by you.
To move through the ocean, the cuttlefish has a wavy-wavy fin that surrounds its mantle.
It also has a siphon, a muscular tube it can squirt water out of for fast propulsion.
Imagine trying to move by vomiting out of a giant straw
and flapping your skirt around very very fast.
That is how a cuttlefish do.
The cuttlefish brain is larger than its entire body
including its brain
which may not make sense, but it does to the cuttlefish,
because it has a very large brain.
The cuttlefish has a very advanced eye
roughly in the shape of Charlie Brown's mouth when he misses a football
or perhaps a W that someone wrote when they were drunk
or the letter Q
that someone wrote when they were really drunk.
Despite its big brain and weird eyes, the cuttlefish is colorblind
which is curious because it is a color magician of the deep!
Like a lactose-intolerant cheesemaker, the cuttlefish is unaware of its own gifts.
With the help of millions of color-changey things in its skin, it can change color and texture almost instantaneously.
Playing hide and seek with a cuttlefish sucks.
They don't move, they just change color. You can hear them breathing while you count.
How the cuttlefish determines the backgrounds it blends into is largely a mystery
because it can do it in complete darkness.
(Which is kind of a dumb gift if you ask me.)
(But still amazing!)
Then there's the flamboyant cuttlefish
which doesn't try to blend in with sh-t.
It just says, "Why doesn't the world try to blend in with me?"
You go, little man. Don't go changin' for nobody.
When it is threatened, the cuttlefish will often release ink from its ink sac.
The cuttlefish releases that ink in one of two ways:
One is a little priffing sort of squirt. Something you might say "excuse me" after.
The second is a release of both ink and mucus. More of a "throw your underwear out and go home early" sort of inking.
These are called pseudomorphs, and are designed to be decoys for the cuttlefish as it escapes.
The cuttlefish feeds by extending two hidden feeding tentacles which it uses to snag prey and pull it back towards its poison beak.
What?
Well, apparently it has a beak.
Cuttlefish mating begins when the male delicately grabs the female by the face and inserts another specialized tentacle into an opening near her mouth,
which I hope is not her nose,
and inserts sperm sacs.
Males have four pairs of arms and females have three.
Weaker males often disguise themselves as females by hiding two of their arms!
(This reminds me of what I may or may not have done in the mirror as a young boy.)
These cleverly disguised males swim right past the competition and do the face sex thing.
After the female eggs are fertilized,
she gingerly and lovingly puts her eggs in some random friggin' hole on the bottom of the ocean.
The eggs are called sea grapes
by people who like sh-tty wine
and they are guarded by the couple until they hatch
into the cutest little freaks in the universe.
These little bebes are not so good at the camouflage
but they do the best that they can.
Cover yourself up, little man, and sleep tight.
Remember:
if you ever want to come out of your shell
and let your freak flag fly,
the cuttlefish has your back.
Or front. I don't know, I can't tell with them what's front and what's back.
Point is, don't let the tentacle parts wrap around your head.
Or if it happens, plug your nose.
'Cause your nose might get pregnant.
🧍
Some people have been asking me
Is it a dude or a chick
Is he a guy or is he a woman
He sounds like a guy... but he has long hair like a bichon
No offense or nothin' but like are you my mom or my dad
Is he gay? Am I gay?
Is he a woman?
Does he have panty lines?
Girls come in here
I need you to help find panty lines on this guy because I think he's a chick
Commenters who are playing the keyboard bongos
You can tell when someone's really heated and confused and they don't have time to think
All they can do is just
[type frantically]
Am I a man?
Can I consider myself a man if, in a pinch, I can dry myself off with a hand towel?
My concept of a man is someone who whacks their elbow a little bit at a Bertucci's
And has no hangups about freaking. out.
Ow! Son of a bitch!
Zero qualms about going full Streetcar Named Desire at 2pm in a Bertucci's
Putting on a one-man show in which the only words are his wife's name,
Jesus Mary and Joseph,
Son of a fucking bitch
At what age do I become ok having an absolute meltdown in a public place?
Like, when I'm in public alone, I just wanna vanish
If I hear music playing outside of a store
I will actively try to not walk to the beat
Because I don't wanna look like I just got out of a "Take Back Your Life" seminar
Like I feel like this is my day, do you know what I mean?
When do I become immune to the shame of just giving a simian performance whenever I get angry in public?
Like, I'm still traumatized from when the mailman saw me eating a grapefruit naked in 2011.
You know when you haven't said anything yet that day, and you're suddenly thrust into a social situation
So what you end up saying is something just like
Et-uh, hi
You've just been kind of festering in the wilderness of your own apartment
You have go through birth, K through 8, driver's ed, just to contextualize yourself
You just end up saying something like
BOuEeeeeeei
What?
BaAAyyy!
And it was a feral encounter
This was before I had the showpony that you see before you
I had new long hair, it was ratty and all Yellowstone-bartender-y
I had just grown it out, because I had just left Massachussetts
When you leave Massachussetts, you're just like
Yahoo!
I'm gonna take a risk!
Because no one's taken a risk in Massachussetts since the Boston Tea Party
Massachussetts is a neo-Puritanical society.
Oh, what's the "neo" part?
Matchbox 20.
That's the only-- that's the one... addition to the culture since the Salem Witchcraft Trials.
You know, one time on the radio, they played the same Dave Matthews Band song twice in a row in Boston, and I don't think it was an accident.
Nobody looks at you in California
You could be bouncing around on a pogo stick in the nude
And people are like
Continue on your journey. Namaste.
You wear like a weird pair of shoes in Boston, you will be fed to the Dropkick Murphys. Marty Walsh himself will do it.
Son of a bitch!
I just don't see myself getting to the point where I spill a little bit of whipped cream on my khakis
And I'm like, mm, ah ok
I'm gonna deal with this here,
In front of my wife's friends, hired waitstaff, the guy who refs my daughters' soccer games--
That's right, I'm having daughters. No sons, ok? Sons are gross.
Every time I see a guy with his son, I'm just like
Ew, what are you guys, an improv group?
Although the one tough thing about having a daughter is knowing that at one point she will hook up with a photographer.
I don't care that we're at Bertucci's, Betsy
Except I'll be middle-aged, so I won't have any handle on proper nouns.
I don't care if we're at Terbucci's, Betsy.
I don't care if we're at Terbucci's,
the Cheese Factory,
Five Guys One Cup,
Bagera Bread,
or the Outhouse Steakback!
I don't think I can call myself a man until I get cut off in traffic and I get the urge to "ride their ass"
I'm gonna ride their ass!
Let's talk for a second about the sad revenge of riding their ass.
When you follow behind your traffic offender as closely as possible
Oh nice move pal! I'm gonna ride their ass.
Not really sure how that's revenge
If anything, it seems kind of supportive
There have been times in my life where I could've really used someone just directly behind me
Gently ushering me to my destination
Dad, you know that you have no control over where they're even going right now
You're impacting their life in no negative way
You're just a volunteer highway shepherd with zero say in where your flock ends up
Your actions are saying
"I wanna be as close to you as possible"
I know right now to you this seems like sweet, sweet Shakespearean vengance
But you're just behaving like a girlfriend on a couch
You could be on the biggest couch in the world
As soon as you touch down-- you don't even know that your girlfriend's home--
A head descends into your lap
From outta nowhere
WA-POOH!
She just falls from the ceiling like a stalagtite in sweatpants
Then she embarks on a violent and reckless quest to discover the most comfortable spot of your body
She's hittin' her head all over your thighs
And you have to stifle your agony because she's small, so she's unaware of all the damage that she's capable of doing
Not dissimilar from Lennie
This guy has a girlfriend?
Yeah, we met on Waze.
Back to my thesis question, "am I a man?"
Let me answer this anecdotally.
I was walking around the streets of Clifton, Massachussetts a couple years ago
And a guy pulls up in a pickup truck, you know, a real Buffalo wings kind of guy
He rolls down his window, and he looks at me and just goes
"Nope."
🧖♂️
Excuse me. All due respect.
He opened it up. I'm gonna say something.
I've been rooming with this guy on and off for what is it, ten years?
This was not a walk in the park. This was a sentence. A ten year sentence.
The man is a personal nightmare. He wears the same underwear three days running. He takes no pride in his appearance, in the simple amenities of life.
You wanna talk about towels? The man cannot be in a hotel without using all the towels. I'm talking face towels, bath towels, the bath mat, the little washcloths, like he's living alone. You need a towel, you know where it is? In a wet pile on the floor.
I come back to the room one time, the man is pissing in the sink. Right in the sink. Right in the fucking sink. I say, "Tommy, what's wrong with you. There's a toilet over there." He says, "This was closer."
This is what I'm dealing with! The man is not properly socialized. Frankie doesn't have to deal with it. Gaudio doesn't. I've had to deal with it. TEN. YEARS.