jonberger

The glasses I got are great,
It the thing is,
when I put on each new pair,
I turn into an entirely new person.

With the rimless titanium set,
I transform into Egon Terrarium,
a Guatemalan Numbers runner from the ‘40s
who lives in El Paso.
He doesn’t know what he’s doing here and now
so everything is really up in the air.

The golden granny glasses turn me into John Lennon (no surprise), but it’s 1980 Johnny L., right after the shooting.
I’m all bloody and hurt in my head,
and I’m wondering where Yoko is.
“Oh Yoko!” I shout. “Turn me on, dead man!”
I tend not to put them on too often.

Then there’re the shades, after which I become the Terminator, letting folks know, “I’ll be Bach,”
but never bringing up any other classicist whatsoever.
Since I never come back with firearms,
my returns are always anticlimactic.

These glasses seemed better when I thought they would just improve my vision, not my personality.
I’m thinking I may want my money back.

If there’s one thing I regret more than any other,
it’s that I didn’t tell you
that you owed me for that extra bagel
I bought for you.

It really sticks in my craw that I let you just get that for free.
It feels really unfair that you got away with that dollar seventy five purchase scott-free and nobody even knows about it.
You may even be unaware that you cheated me,
and that just isn’t right.
If you’re taking advantage of me,
I want you to at least be aware of it
when you’re doing it.

So let me fix that.
You’ve stolen almost two dollars of my inheritance
by not paying me back
for the bagel I got you
after your uncle passed five years back.

I thought you should know.

Why can’t you do limericks?
All these words
in all these things you write…
aren’t you thinking about your audience
when you’re writing?
Don’t you realize we have places to go
people to molest?
We can’t spend all our time listening to your prattle all night?
With a limerick or eight, you’ll be in and out in –
I can’t do the calculations,
but it’ll be quicker than the time you spend
doing whatever it is you do.

Stick to limericks.
I’ll bet it’ll be better.

They knew him far and wide as the provider, the adult in the room, the breadwinner.
He was the father of children, but they called him Mister Pathak,
for Aashish P had no first name.

“I will be spoken to with respect,” he thundered,
“or not spoken to at all.”
The youth cowered in his presence, and shuddered at his call.
When he spoke to them, they said, “Yes, Mister Pathak,”
and moved along quickly, for it became clear that further communication
was going to be kind of a bummer.

“Yes, run along, younglings!” Aashish would laugh, “Go about your business,
knowing that you have provided due honor to your elders.” Aashish smiled,
and then went back to his computer to do whatever adult things he did.

The children, out of earshot, returned to their pop rocks and cocaine
and no one was ever any the wiser.

Aashish Pathak maintained his hallowed reputation as the man with no first name,
until the kids became legal adults, when they didn’t call him anything anymore.

There is a moral to this story, and it should be clear to any
who has been paying attention:
pop rocks and cocaine are very fizzy.

Hey Mandy,
when I called you with my ridiculously lame excuse,
I didn’t realize it was a ridiculously lame excuse,
but that was probably because I was ridiculously lame at the time.
Shit, if in the intervening years, since… the accident…
you’ve become more sensitive about speech,
then I’m sorry about the “lame” commentary.

Keep in mind, I’m self-labeling,
so that means something, right?
Anyway…

I got your number from a mutual friend
because you seemed really cute
and cool, too
but I called saying, “Who’s number is this?”
Since you knew I had asked for your number,
my cover was blown from the start,
but you engaged with me anyway.
I really appreciated that.

We seemed to get along well.

You liked Elvis Costello, too,
having deeper thoughts on Imperial Bedroom than I did.

I felt a little stupid at the time.
I don’t know why I didn’t try to arrange a date.
Wasn’t that the point all along?
You were probably too much for me.

I was shocked to hear that you rammed
into a mountain,
but pretty proud to hear you’d written a novel
and some stories before then.
We hadn’t talked about that stuff
all those years earlier.

I’m so glad to hear you got so much done
in your years on the planet.

Bummer that it was a short life,
but you definitely lived it, Mandy.

I wish I was in it more.

If you get caught red-handed with the drug-pile
and find a way to blame it all on someone else,
or if you accept blame but somehow work it
so that another victim takes the pelts.
Or, say you commit the greatest slander,
or possibly just welsh on all your debts.
Perhaps you get your friends to hit each other
by convincing them to take your stupid bets.
What if you steal repeatedly from children
in hopes of getting credit off in tax?
Maybe you claim you’ll sue anyone who
says they’re upset with you
– just to get them off your freaking backs.

If you think that you’ve done some good,
but believe that doing dishes is some work,
then you’re an entitled, unreasonable idiot
and you’re still a goddamned child, you jerk.

When we lived together,
six to a room
you asked me and our other roommates
to vacate so you could have
your girlfriend over for the weekend.
As I recall, the other guys acquiesced.
As you recall, I did not.

Yours did not seem a justifiable request.
It seemed outsized, inconvenient,
and nothing that would ever be reciprocated.
I didn’t like the temerity of your ask.
I could tell you were upset, but your girlfriend seemed to understand.
She came anyway, and you seemed to find other arrangements
that didn’t seem to put five other people out
for your convenience.

I guess maybe it worked out, then.

Paul Collins led The Beat in the US
after he was a member of the Nerves
with Jack Lee and Peter Case.
They did “Hangin’ on the Telephone,”
which Blondie liked enough to make a hit.

Dave Wakeling led The Beat in the UK
along with Ranking Roger on vocals,
where they ska’d it up during the same late seventies,
early eighties years. Wakeling and Roger
became the English Beat
and Collins became Paul Collins’ Beat,
just to give each other breathing room.
The English Beat became the bigger band,
with “Save It For Later” being the biggest song
to come out of it all.
It’s a smash.

Wakeling and Roger ended up in General Public,
and their bandmates became Fine Young Cannibals
and International Beat.
Paul Collins ended up in the Paul Collins Band,
which, you know, I guess,
we could have assumed would have happened.

The Beat wars ended exactly as they should:
not with a bang,
but with bruises.

The question is raised every now and then:
Who is better than Elvis Costello?

Now the question can be answered:
(At fighting the British Empire in India)
Mahatma Gandhi
(At dancing the frug in black and white)
Patty Duke
(At winning the Nobel Literature Prize)
Bob Dylan
(At winning the Welterweight Championship)
Sugar Ray Leonard
(At starting a crackpot religion)
L. Ron Hubbard
(At starting a bigger crackpot religion)
Jesus H. Christ
(At collaborating with Elvis Costello)
Paul McCartney.

See?
Elvis Costello is great in many ways,
but in many other ways
he can be bettered.

Let that be a lesson to him
and his admirers.

Climate Change is a motherfucker – and not in a good way.
Eighteen sixteen was the Year Without a Summer,
which featured Europe’s coldest summer on record
for a two hundred and thirty four year period.
It was rough.
It was not man-made climate change, though
– unless humans somehow developed volcanoes,
which we’ve so far failed to claim credit for.

Evidence suggests that Mount Tambora’s eruption
in Indonesia was the likeliest culprit in causing the coldness,
generating the environmental change.
There were many likely rollout effects:
The US Midwest was probably settled
because the Northeast settlements suffered so much
in the Year Without a Summer.
The Church of Latter Day Saints was likely developed as it was
thanks to the cold snap.
A dearth of oats to feed horses probably produced an interest
in creating new forms of transportation,
such as the draisine and the velocipede.
Being forced to stay in darker days led to the writing of
Frankenstein, The Vampyre, and the poem “Darkness.”

Do we thank Climate Change for all this?
Of course not.
But maybe we hope that human ingenuity continues
to roll out effects from traumatic Climate Change
as we experience it going forward.
Something to hope for, at least.