Arthur Graham > Recent Status Updates

This story begins with a man, a dream, and a statue. Or maybe it’s a man, a garbage fire, and an unfortunate problem.

I’m asleep in the dining room of a Church’s Chicken, and my face is stuck to the table.

The Ambien warning label is now required to have verbiage saying that in some rare cases, you may fly an AH-64D Apache Longbow attack helicopter and fire AGR-20A Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System precision-guided munitions at ground targets in your sleep, and you should talk to your doctor immediately if this happens.

I think that Jedi perfectly summed up the end of childhood for me.

David Lee Roth let Eddie Van Halen play keyboards once. What the fuck does he know about nutrition? I saw a picture of him recently and he looks like the fucking crypt keeper. Maybe if it was a breakfast of brown M&M’s and cocaine, he would know full details on it.

Flowing on the Bench

As I was going to sleep
on the iron bench
in the back of the bar
I felt all right
I felt like I was joining something
Not the Kiwanis Club
No
I felt like one river joining another
I felt like the Mississippi
flowing into the Ohio
Right where Jim & I
passed Cairo in the fog
Right where the book got good

Things I'd Like to Do Preferably Before I Die

A) Get Suzy
B) Get Drunk
C) Write some
poetry
D) That's all
E) Wait a minute
Wait a minute
Wait a minute
one more
summer storm
would be nice

“Let’s get us some fuckin’ pannycakes!” Freddy kicked me in the back with his velcro Keds while I tried to sleep on the floor of the Satanic man-cave room in his mom’s basement. Spending the night at Freddy’s was always the worst possible scenario.

We’re all time travelers, moving one second into the future every second.

A bad rower blames the oar

One time, I ran into Iggy Pop at a Chipotle in Orem, Utah. He had a “black card” from Chipotle corporate, which gave him unlimited everything at any Chipotle restaurant. I guess they used a quote from the song “I Wanna Be Your Dog” on the side of a drink cup, and he got paid with free Chipotle for life.

Courtin'

It was Sunday in the swamp
I was all dressed up
like Albert the Alligator
(handsome man look good
in anything he put on)
I said to the turtle
I said "Hand me that banjo
I'm goin' over to Suzy's house
and serenade her"
Turtle said "You goddamn fool
you never played no banjo in your life"
& I said "Yeah
but you ain't seen Suzy
I'm gone play her
the complete works of Rimsky-Korsakov"

Another dumb
anecdote's turning
into a poem down at
S. Carrollton & Claiborne.

Old friend,
why can't we at least
make the right mistakes?

God's Last Words to the Stars

Coming home from beer with a beer
I hear the brain cells popping off
one by one like firecrackers

The stars going out one by one
leaving the sky black

God sweeping the last stars
under the celestial rug

Muttering not Good riddance
to bright rubbish but (more kindly)
Out of sight out of mind

Approaching the Solstice

Canal Street sizzles
like an egg on the grill:
high in the nineties.

Jesus! a man would have to be
crazy, or in his sixth
childhood, to fall in love again
in this town in the summer!

But nobody ever learns
anything—that's what
tragedy teaches. So
my hottest wish now
rather figures: to get
out of the frying pan
and into the fire
under your cool white dress.

The language wants
to love you: let it.

Bernardo de Galvez who played
"so decisive a role" in the War
for American Independence
just off the ferry from Spain
on his horse looks inductively
over my head up Canal Street
as if to say Where can a man get
a drink in this part of History

I'll never write another line
for anything but love
in this city where steam
rises off the street after
a rain like bosoms heaving.

I was a rebel against
the confederacy of the saved; I wanted to be
wearing a monocle and drinking
neon COCKTAILS, leaning on a lamppost
on the broadest boulevard in hell,
or cruising down the river
to heaven between your legs.

Me and Virgil cruised the mini-marts in a hundred-mile radius in his beaten-up jeep, looking for the one magical gas station that might still have Surge soda. (This was after the supply had run out, but long before they briefly rebooted it.) That fully-loaded citrus elixir, a magic mix of caffeine and terror, propelled me through life for years before suddenly vanishing from most stores.

Peggy was just a friend, and despite telling me “we’re just friends and I’d never fuck you” like six times an hour for our entire friendship, she wrote me a giant letter ten years later saying she totally wanted to fuck me and was constantly giving me the green light, and I was a fucking idiot for never picking it up,

“Get in. There’s a COPS marathon on and I need to get home before I miss another episode.”
“Did they taze anyone yet?”
“Of course they fucking tazed someone. Why do you think I watch it?”

She told me she was having a topless barbecue and that she was in love with me and I should come over and bring chips. She was completely drunk, and I’m obviously stupid, so with little hesitation, I bought a bag of Ruffles and a bag of Doritos, because I didn’t know what kind of party this would be.

It would almost be cool if it wasn’t.

The woman next to me in the theater ate a fried ostrich leg she snuck in from the Ost-Fil-A restaurant, a new restaurant that served the biggest chunks of deep-fried flightless bird flesh imaginable to the pro-Jesus, anti-gay crowd imaginable. (Not to be confused with Osto-Fil-A, which is a pro-Jesus store for fetishists who ate from colostomy bags.)

Park Bench Poem

Mind if I put up
a park bench
in your mind?
I mean, if
the mind is a park,
why not have a poem in it?

The Reason Why

My eyes? You don't have
to tell me. I stay
drunk all the time now.
It's on purpose. I'm
drinking myself to
death. Melodrama!
That's why. Because just
living is a dis-
traction. Getting out
of the car, the bed,
the rain, is next to
impossible. And
being drunk makes it
harder, which makes me
mad, which is how I
like it. Because it
never occurred to
me that the end of
the world would be so
dull.

Hypothetical Self-Epitaph

What if I just caved in,
gave out, pulled over
to the side of
the road of life,
& expired like an old
driver's license?
You might say He didn't
get far in 31 years.
But I'd say That's
all right, it was
the world's longest trip
on an empty tank.

Well, what is all this? you
want to know. Right again. I could
say I don't know myself because the evidence
is not all in, never will be. I could say it's
the unfinished moon poem I've always wanted
to almost write. Well, what is it all about? you
ask. What does it mean? You have me
there. It means, whatever this is between
you and me, I hope it's not over, and good-by.