Stop Play Doh-ing With My Heart
for Helen, again
Ok. I get it. You don’t want me around anymore. Good for you. But do you have to walk around smiling like a little girl who’s just gotten everything she’s ever wanted for Christmas? When you know damn well that my own personal Santa Clause was gunned down before he even made it to the chimney? Taken out by a cartoonishly large bullet, lodged in his neck. A bullet that was voraciously thrust out of a gun belonging to one of your loyal hand job riddled goons. The shot causing him to fall 1000 feet from his sleigh to land blood-first all over the roof of my third floor apartment building.
So while you dance around the Christmas tree fondling the firm buttocks of your brand new life without me, I’m stuck here explaining to the cops why there’s an obese corpse in a red suit splattered all over the roof.
You’ve got so many other brand new toys to play with, darlin’. Is it too much to ask that you stop fucking with me? Please. I’m not a proud man. I’m begging you here. Stop Play Doh-ing with my heart! Every day since you’ve been gone, it’s the same thing. I’m a full time prisoner in your Play Doh Fun Factory, which for tax sheltering reasons and also just to fuck with me, has been outsourced to a shadily disillusioned hillside in Hell.
Life goes these days: this way. This is my life.
Every morning I wake up to find myself immediately pinned down by your un-unionized factory workers and watch in hung over horror as they cut out my heart for you, using an official Play Doh brand trimming knife. I watch as they drag it across the floor to where you keep the Extractor. I watch as they put my heart in one end and pull the lever. My heart goes in looking like one thing and comes out looking like something else.
It comes out looking like an unwatched episode of Welcome Back Cotter. It comes out looking like a decapitated sitcom. It comes out looking like Thundar The Barbarian. What the fuck?! I’d totally forgotten about Thundar! I used to watch the shit out of that show when I was a kid.
It comes out looking like a pigeon shit riddled telephone booth. It comes out looking like a fucked up quarter. It comes out looking like a strung out library card gang banged by late fees. It comes out looking like Chewbaca’s left nut.
It comes out looking like this one nightmare I keep having in which the moon in the sky bends over and moons me and the stars all get synchronized nose bleeds and I am inevitably covered in blood. It comes out looking like your overprotective mother, who never really liked me because I didn’t make enough money to support her daughter in the manner in which you were accustomed and also because she thought I drank too much and wrote overly sentimental poetry about my dick.
It comes out looking like a semen stained Snuggie. Which is weird, because I only beat off into that Snuggie once!
It comes out looking like a Mr. Rogers meets Oscar the Grouch sex tape. Mr. Rogers swears that he’s innocent. But can he explain that rotten banana peel and the new posthumously released Michael Jackson CD that’s somehow ‘mysteriously’ been garbaged tight against his crotch? Your crotch only gets that way if you’re fucking a trash can, mate! A trash can that while you’re sticking your dick in and out of it, the furry green thing that lives inside hums songs about looking both ways before crossing the street while (using his ornery tongue) he alphabetizes your nuts.
It comes out looking like me sobbing internally, all the time. Which is just getting ridiculous. I’ll admit that. It comes out looking like insomnia and grape jelly (Where was the grape jelly this morning?! I couldn’t find the grape jelly!). It comes out looking like Lady Gaga dressed up like William Katt.
Shit! Make it stop!
Every fucking minute, of every fucking day, you put my heart in one end and pull the lever. Which is a real-live recipe for insanity!
It comes out looking like a white flag stained with Kate Gossling’s menstrual blood. It comes out looking like Sarah Palin field dressing a gut shot Tella Tubby. It comes out looking like the ‘Don’t Squeeze The Charmin’ guy caught in a compromising position with a prostitute named Charmin.
It comes out looking like a sexually explicit tell-all written by Ryan Seacrest’s old braces. It comes out looking like a handmade stuffed Rugrats doll sewn together by a part time serial killer with cerebral palsy. It comes out looking like the great sleeping god Cthulhu having insane sex dreams involving a provocatively figured alarm clock.
It comes out looking like everything that I’ve lost and won’t get back again.
Shit, Helen.
It comes out looking like you.
(previously published in Monkey Puzzle #11 (monkeypuzzlepress.com)
Multiverse Johnson 