hobo din­ners on the half shell
asian girls in tupac tees
white guys with chink eyes
the cobble stones are paved with blood
from rats that hide
beneath the street

Wow, he said to him­self. This poem means noth­ing. But he didn’t want to say that to his friend who wanted to be a writer, because his friend who wanted to be a writer had a his­tory of viol­ence, plus he had writ­ten a lot of bad poems him­self. So he said, “Yeah man, it’s good. I like it.”

He and his friend who wanted to be a writer were in the tene­ment of his Brook­lyn brown­stone. His friend who wanted to be a writer stared at him deeply, almost into his soul, he thought, search­ing his eye­balls for bull­shit. “Did you like it when I did the thing with the …”

He wondered what his friend who wanted to be a writer might be talk­ing about, but since his friend who wanted to be a writer wasn’t going to fin­ish the thought, he said, “Oh yeah, I liked that.”

“Really?” His friend who wanted to be a writer crossed his arms and smiled proudly, knowingly.

“Yeah man, I really like it.” He tried to give the bad poem back.

His friend who wanted to be a writer didn’t uncross his arms and became very ser­i­ous, even omin­ous, and asked, “So you’ll pub­lish it in your journal?”

Fuck, he thought. “Well … I mean,” he took a step back, “I dunno.”

His friend who wanted to be a writer threw an office chair at his head. He ducked. The office chair barely missed him. It crashed into the stair­well behind him. He caught a piece of broken rail­ing as the stairs began to crumble from above. Dust fell upon his friend who wanted to be a writer as he swung for the head, but the next thing he knew he was fly­ing into the brick wall bey­ond the stair­well. He coughed blood and ran up the stairs, but only made it half a flight before they col­lapsed, cov­er­ing him in wood and dust and vag­rant turds. Lines of poetry flowed through his head like piss drip­ping from the freshly exposed rafters.

His friend who wanted to be a writer laughed omin­ously and walked up to him through the dust. His friend who wanted to be a writer kicked him in the nuts and spat in his face. “What about now? Do you want to pub­lish my poem now? Do you see how the cobble­stones are in fact paved with blood? Do you see who is the rat? You are the rat. The blood is yours. I’m going to murder you and write a poem about it. It’s going to be the greatest poem ever. So, you know, don’t worry – your death won’t be for noth­ing. It will be a lit­er­ary death. Schol­ars will write about you in like a hun­dred years, identi­fy­ing you as the true source of my inspir­a­tion, the very thing that gave me my start, because after going to prison for mur­der­ing you I will write the great Amer­ican novel epic poem book thing … you know what I mean. And also, aren’t I omin­ous right now?”

While his friend who wanted to be a writer ego-tripped on punch-drunk delu­sions of grandeur, he found a piece of wood with a nail in it. He pre­ten­ded to listen to what his friend who wanted to be a writer was say­ing, which made it seem vaguely like they were just hanging out in a dive bar, as they often did. He inched the piece of wood with the nail in it toward him, beneath the rubble, so that his friend who wanted to be a writer couldn’t see. When his friend who wanted to be a writer leaned down to strangle him, he plunged the nail deep into his temple.

If he had writ­ten the scene, he would have ima­gined some kind of expres­sion or some­thing, but the truth was there was noth­ing of the sort – his friend who (once) wanted to be a writer simply ceased to inhabit his body, like someone turned the lights out in a Man­hat­tan pent­house where the stairs would not have crumbled and people wrote high lit­er­at­ure that would never be pub­lished by any­one. The body fell to the ground with a dull thud and he thought, wow, how dis­ap­point­ing – not because he was cal­lous or any­thing, but because he really needed some mater­ial for a poem, and now he had to deal with this dead body. He wondered if there was a dif­fer­ence in the long run. He picked up the bad poem.

Reynard Seifert lives in Oak­land, Cali­for­nia. He is a DJ on Viva Radio. His work has appeared or is forth­com­ing on Pindeldy­boz, Hobart, Pank, and Word Riot. He is the pub­lisher of hahac­lever dot com, and gives away music for books on his writer’s blog.