Ben Bonkoske

Do you ever get the feeling you live at the bottom of the ocean? I feel the world swirl around me and the tides raise my anxiety even as I get closer and closer to achieving internal stillness. I swim until my fingers have deoxygenated and frizzled down to veiny earthworms. My cold showers have ceased if you don’t notice a difference. I’ve had two, luxurious, long orgasmic hot showers today and yesterday. I replaced my new dopamine rush with twenty-minute meditation intervals. It helps silence the sea while I read. I suppose when you go so long without, you remember how wonderful it is to have. Especially orgasms. But If I had decided between orgasms, hot showers, and sugar. The order would go hot showers, sugar orgasms. It would also rotate every month. Everybody thinks they are good, noble artists. But there are only so many places at the top. I am a bottom feeder. But! We must remember to believe in our imagination’s insanity. I would cease to exist if I didn’t have this lonely affair of sharing my intimate self-neglect. I’m getting on with it. I counted all my cuts and scars today. You’ll just have to see me naked to know the number. I sometimes wish that humans were more like bears and we hibernated from Thanksgiving until Valentine’s day. It would be a good exchange for siestas. Just a three month long nap. I used to have violent yawns. And I look forward to nothing more than a good head rush. To be taken out of reality is a rare excitement that I invite. I love getting high on my own supply. My mental capacities expand like a rubber band and I die a little inside. It is a daunting thought to think I am going to be present for the next hundred years without any intermission. We probably sleep more than three months out of the year. Goodbye little lovebirds. I’ll see you in the spring. I’ll be sleeping, snoring, and dreaming of all that is coming. A lucky lucky little ugly lady that might be willing to sit through this deplorable play while I whisper in her ear the whole time. I want to write a long poem that will serve as my review for life. The title will be Fast Food Service and be about outer space. We all long to be in the stars, looking from the bottom of another abyss.