ENTREATY

Penpal, will you stream L’amour de loin and weep with me please? Will you not sit yourself beside me. Like that? I am just here to chat, there is no need to keep your shirt on. I would rest easy in the eves if I knew how to find them. They just keep finding me, but only bits and pieces, too small to speak. I heard again the word “potsherd,” could not help but think of myself. 

Penpal, will you lay your ectoplasmic tumescence up against mine? I’m sorry to make this weird, but that’s the only way I can do it. There’s something deep in the seed I’ve been trying to find ever since my cotyledons parted. Partied. I want so badly to be a more simple organism, grass. But who then would feed the world. Not these dangling balloons of ink.

Penpal, is there something more I can do for you? Something so you can keep sending me these pictures. I want to write them all down. I want to whirl about in going live to air these sentences are not concrete at all. Tiny particles of gypsum form an insulating blanket along the insides of my lungs. I am becoming a cairn. You will see me in ~1k years.

ARRANGEMENT

Penpal, thank you for allowing me to speak to you over the phone. I was thinking about the phrase “hold on.” How it means I’m going to cuddle you for a bit but then also how it means, Don’t put the receiver down, keep me by your ear even though actually now that I think about it I won’t be right back. Watch my stuff here for a sec. In Casanova San Fermin sings: And I, will keep, a place, for you. And I... Now I am about to cry, but I don’t. Now I am wanting to cry. How it means, You are my only refuge. 

Hold on the line.

I am thinking about laying more floorboards on top of my other floorboards, but putting them horizontal. I should say the new ones would go on a totally different floor. I mean they’d be perpendicular, but not standing on end. If you could look down through both floors you would see what I am talking about. Am I making any sense. I know I will never do any of this.

Penpal, my dick pointed to the horizon this morning. I wanted to ease its membranous self out of its fleshy habitual being. I know you can’t just do that. Penpal, I’m using a UV flashlight to search for the cat piss on the floor. I am thinking about I <3 Huckabees, trying to remember if both of the men slid around in the mud. Jason Schwartzmann and that guy whose name I can’t remember. Fuck the grass, I just want (to be) Jason’s rock.

ENGAGEMENT

Penpal, I hear they still can’t find anything but white people in Hollywood. I can sit through a whole boring movie and to someone that’s a kind of superpower. I would finish that thought, but a van just pulled up blaring talk radio and now I’m on edge. You know what they say about us on talk radio. They get frustrated there are so many different kinds. Kindnesses. You know what they say about talk radio.

Why can’t I strike (generally) against the blood on the wall? I cannot find it. I look into the runoff and there’s some weird shit in there. I look at the people waiting for help at the corner, will it come? I want to strike (debt). I look at these bananas glistening in their unequal sheen. Maybe these are not each results of the same system unless we say that system is just what I’ve been looking through this whole time. I know the blood is there, but someone keeps whitewashing the wall. (Tax.)

I just want to be clear about this. Penpal. Some of this shit is evil and we let it go anyway. You need to know when not to look away. There are little growths on my skin. No doctor can recognize them. I’m the only one studies them on a regular basis. There are little growths on an old red and blue rag. Someone will not stop clinking their pennies against a flagpole. I have to go. Maybe today I will be a tadpole. May you see us through ~1k more tears. 

May you see me in the street there.

Jacob Billingsley is a queer, bipolar poet writing and working in the St. Louis metro area. Originally from the other side of that state, he studied English with an emphasis in creative writing at the University of Missouri. His debut work appeared in ANMLY, and another poem is forthcoming in EcoTheo Review. You can find him on Twitter @jajobi.