Fear stands in the corner. Waiting.

The Other guy’s on the couch, talking to himself,
Walking with himself through the park in his head,
Smoking a fountain pen,
Smoking the fountain of youth and indignation.

By the time I get home, Entropy’s set in.
Moss on the walls, practically.
Barnacles on my housemate’s face.
“Dude,” I just have to ask, “what the fuck have you been smoking?”
But all he has sticking out between his bleeding-gum teeth
Is that goddamn fountain pen.

“You want some” asks the roomy roomie.
“Put that thing away!” I holler.
Fountain pens are for junkies.
“What the fuck have you been doing all day?
This place is a disaster zone.
Were you born in a barn or in a pig-sty?
What about getting a job?
What about getting your life together?”

But the roomie blows fountain pen smoke
Out his fountain pen stained pie-hole
And mutters distinctly
“Business Chicken doesn’t like it when I clean.”

Fear starts to stir in the corner,

A collection or a string of familiar detritus
Pouring itself into a human shape.

He’s talked about Business Chicken before.
(I’m confused–is it a chicken or a business?
All up in your business or too chicken to make things real?
A chicken in a suit?
A chicken head on a business body?
Bad decisions come home to roost.)

“I refuse to play your childish mind-games,”
I protest too much.
“Put that thing down and help–”
But his eyes have widened, too wide. He looks past me
And I can see that he likes what he sees
Just a little too much for my comfort.

“What?” I ask him
Even though I don’t really want to know.
“Turn around,” says the fountain-pen Junkie.
I turn to the right because I know what’s on my left in the darkness
And I know I’m not ready to see it
But there’s nothing else there. “What?”
“It’s Business Chicken,” says the voice behind me
Of the disturbed mind that lives in my house.

“He’s asking you to dance.”

I am not going to dance, I affirm. Not today.
Not any more than I’m going to smoke his pen with him.
No more, I say, I am a man of action.
Words do not become me.

And yet imaginary though the Business Chicken might be to him,
I smell poultry in the room
I feel the tiny feathers tickling my face up my nose and into
My Brain where they cluck cluck cluck cluck cluck all my
Troubles away, all my responsibilities
Until nothing is left but the shadowy shape in the corner
With a grill where its mind should be
And now it’s moving around the room.

“Business Chicken likes it when I sit around all day,”
says the white rabbit.
“He knows where it’s at. He thinks people work too much.
He thinks jobs are overrated. They’re what’s killing the
Economy. We should all eat more fish.
Right?”

The computer on the desk high-fives the fork
On the dining room table at this suggestion
And fear takes hold of me.

“What do you WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANT”

And fear is in front of me
Short stubby fingers doing things that
Short stubby fingers shouldn’t be able to do
To my face
To my hair
To my spleen
To mitochondria
To memories of days when I’ve sat on the couch
And days when I’ve tried to find work that suits me
And now Business Chicken wants the Robot and the Dinosaur
To fight
But Fear keeps making me dance. And those
Short stubby fingers pull out of my eye-sockets
So that Fear can wrap something around me that I can’t see
Until I look at my reflection in the dusk-darkened window.
It looks kind of familiar–I’m not sure where it’s from.
But when I have it on my face
It feels really out of place.

“Banana Bandana Man,” says the white rabbit. “Business Chicken
Really knows what’s going on.”

If you are a woman
Living in the United States of America in 2017,
You Will Be Uncomfortable.
Eyes will always be on you.
Hands will always be reaching for you.
Sometimes they will touch
And sometimes their touch will not be gentle.

If you have dark skin
And live in the United States of America in 2017,
You Will Be Uncomfortable.
Eyes will always look away from you.
Strangers will cross the street to avoid you.
People will say things
And not all of them will be embarrassed at what they say.

If your love is unconventional
And you live in the United States of America in 2017,
You Will Be Uncomfortable.
You will be judged
And told that how you feel is a decision that you can change.
You can choose to hide, to lie about yourself,
But will that really make you any less
Uncomfortable?

If you have a “disability”
Either mental or physical
And you live in the United States of America in 2017,
You certainly don’t need me to tell you
How Uncomfortable You Will Be
Always to be reminded that you are different.

But just because you are different,
Why should you be made to feel that way?

If you are a straight white man in 2017
Born in the United States of America
To a good home with supportive parents,
There is a very good chance
That you will be given every opportunity to prove your worth.
Some more than others, true,
But all of us more than them.
We will be seen as active subjects of our own sentences,
Given the benefit of the doubt, even armed in crowded spaces,
And not be told that to want what we want is in any way
Unnatural.
Yet We, too, Shall Be Uncomfortable.
That’s just the way the world is.

Because the differences are fading,
The different are gaining ground
And when you’ve been in the lead for so long,
It’s hard to be told there’s no such thing as a race.
It’s Uncomfortable.
So if you are a straight white man in 2017,
Born in the United States of America,
Please learn to live with being Uncomfortable from time to time,
With being called out, with ceding power
To those who aren’t straight white American males.
We are all going to be
Uncomfortable
Or, at least, that’s the best we can hope for.

I originally wrote this on November 9th, 2016. Still relevant, I guess.

I thought about not coming in to work today,
But then I remembered that I am a straight, white man
and have nothing to fear.
I thought about moving back to Belgium,
The country I grew up in and still call home,
Not because I have to
or even because I want to,
Not because I have a job lined up
or even know
what I would do
when I got there,
But because I was angry.
So instead, I went to work today,
In a blue state
Because angry white men will destroy this country
if we let them
(and maybe even if we don’t)
So I have a responsibility
As a straight white man
who has a job
who has a supportive family
who is in good health
To do what I can to break this cycle,
to be in the thick of it, the thicker and thicker it gets,
to use my voice
unfairly made louder than many that are better
As an echoing chamber
for messages of hope
for powerful diatribes
for attempts at edicts that call for manners
No matter how feeble
For there are things that are said about power
about great responsibility
about absolute corruption
And I will err on the side of compassion
every time.

It doesn’t register at first
But by the time I realize something’s wrong,
It’s too late to go back and change it.
“I’m sorry,” I tell the customer, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to start
all over from the beginning.”
And I press the button.
“Error,” says the computer. “Your Void has been canceled.”
Something must be wrong. Again; I press it.
“Error,” it repeats. “Your Void has been canceled.”
“But how is that a thing?” I demand, out loud.
How can the Void
Be canceled?

Nature abhors a vacuum, of course.
That’s the reason vacuums work at all.
“There can’t be nothing there,” says nature.
“If there’s nothign to put there, we’ll make something up.”
And so there are twitterings and ditherings in the very Void.
But how can there not be nothing?
If you can’t have nothing, where can you even start?
How dare we cancel the Void?

What were you doing all last year? the man from Manpower asked me.
“I was in Brussels,” I said, “living with my parents,
Taking a year off. Writing.”
“And what did you accomplish?”
“I did a lot of writing.”
“But what did you accomplish?”
The working world abhors a vacuum.
This is how I know I must cancel the void.

Standing here out in front of my register
Feels more demeaning than standing behind it.
“Greet customers,” they tell me.
Commerce abhors a vacuum!
So I beckon them even before they’re ready.
I am a prostitute
Standing at the mouth of her alleyway,
Beckoning, “Are you reeeeaaady?”
And when I’ve caught a mark or john
Willing to buy a screw,
I take him back where we can do our business,
Where he can cancel my void,
Filling up my drawers with cash,
Until I finally hand him a note that begs
“Enter me
For a chance to win a five thousand dollar gift card!”

Why am I even here?
I, with my degrees, I with my ambitions.
How did I even get to this place,
Spending four to eight hours a day
Smiling at strangers, to bow and to scrape
For barely enough money to cancel the debt
From my studies, let alone move out of my home.
Let alone invest in my future.
And for what?
This job means less than nothing to me.
Why did I even come here?
I needed a job and this was better than nothing.
I’m just canceling the Void.
But how I so adore a vacuum.