Sometimes I could just
burst into tears. I found some friends,
but they don�t understand

I just don�t care about baseball
and cupcake bakes and
beer pong. And I don�t �hang out.�

I don�t like hanging out.
And I don�t like bowling.
Sometimes I get in these moods, Animal,

and I become intolerable even to myself.
But I become very anxious
about my brain cells.

I feel that I need
all the brain cells I have.
Because I need to remember all the things

I saw and heard, and I need to remember
all the things I memorized.
And mostly all the people, especially

the people whom I miss the most.
I need to remember their voices and faces,
their real faces talking and laughing and not

some face from a photograph of them.
It�s like all the real faces, when they�re
gone for a while, they always

tend toward those photo faces and then
they become the photo faces and then I know
I�ve forgotten. And I could just bury myself

in the ground! I could just burst
into a million tears, sharp tears
like daggers that turn back on my body

and stab, stab, stab�tiny piercings
like tiny mouths biting all at once.
Like that Canadian goose somebody found

sitting by the side of the road, just
sitting there. Somebody lifted up
that huge bird and brought it in to us

at the Bird Rescue. The goose didn�t
so much as honk or give even the slightest
whisper of a honk. It didn�t

flap its wings or snap at anybody with its beak.
It looked tired, Lonely Animal.
Very tired. My aunt extended

one of the goose�s wings to see
if the wing was broken
and there, under the wing, in the dense

body of the bird, was an injury
where some car or other
had hit it and driven away.

And in the injury there were
scores of maggots, teeming there,
boring into its soft body, devouring it

alive, mouthful by mouthful
with their tiny, smacking
maggot lips. You know that sound

maggots make when they�re eating,
and mealworms too. A tiny wet smacking
like that gross sound when you stir up

macaroni and cheese. I have one friend
who does a great maggot impression.
But mostly my friends go on big

road trips and have dinner parties.
They talk about NPR. They ask me if I read
Billy Collins. NO I DO NOT

READ BILLY COLLINS. And anyway,
how can they forget their work like that?
Walking down the street with me,

one friend yelled �Fuck you�
at a stranger because he drove by
in a Hummer. Well, I hate all this

political bullshit and I could just
cry a million billion tears but what
good would it do? If one person

does not know how to treat
one other person, what good
are my million tears then?

―Oni Buchanan

maybe I'll move all lyric/poetry copy-pastings to the theoretical pitas page, if it ever re-exists.