my grandfather died two days ago - I found myself mulling lines over in my head, ways to remember him, piecing together my closing-time computer-monitor numbed amateurish eulogy - I grabbed a pen after I'd gotten home and gotten at least three-fourths drunk on cheap red wine, slashed some of the lines into my notebook and began to realize I couldn't eulogize my granddaddy without eulogizing grandma, too, without remembering the way her father's voice sounded on those wax recordings, wondering about this steely eyed soldier who'd come to impregnate his daughter and take her back to Texas - and how about a moment of silence for all those tall cans of beer we inverted, my brother, my cousins and I, after grandma's funeral, talking xerox-ed cotton-ball shit-drunk on the hotel steps 'til four in the morning, those ugly places of mediocre genius where our tea-totalling grandad never visited ...and what would he have contributed to that discussion of space travel, of evolution's idiotic accident that drug us up from idiot Earth, of our great nation's wealth of brainwashed television addicts eating pizza-rolls in the face imminent collapse, in the faces of our inept idiot leaders shitting their beds in dreams of smouldering decay? yeah, Granddaddy, you must've helped in some tiny collaborate way to incinerate all those Japanese on August 6th, 1945, didn't you? tell us what you think of smouldering decay - I was with him at the Hiroshima museum in 2004 and he wept openly, mortified - and two months later had no recollection of ever having been in Japan - that was the first sound of the ice cracking...

what's all this poverty? what's all this health coverage and student loan slavery that's eating my paycheck? what's this hungry alcoholic grandson gonna say now, to milk-drinking G.I. salutes and International Business Machines and social security and national security and federal marshalls and unattended baggage ticking innocently on the concourse? what's a case of empty beer cans tumbling down the hotel stairs on that god-awful sticky August Alabama morning gonna say to a diabetic horde at Thurday night prime-rib special, to fuckwits who'd rather text-message their votes to game-show hosts becuase the good ole boys suck corporate cock through a petrol pipeline, through lumbering Jesus-Wal-Marts, through highway corridors of smiling robot billboard Hades - after you're done fucking your money, please wash it off and give me some - I'm dying, here... what can I say, big daddy? you fucked up -