Michael Derrick Hudson

For Russians the stars are always incontinent, ejaculatory smears across the squalor of a boundlessly unhygienic sky. You’d scoff, Marina, at how I go at them with a tiny plastic shovel and my litter box technique, scooping up the sidereal splooge while trying to wipe down the universe. You’d say I tug at God’s Old Testament beard, praying the prayers of a coward. You’d confide to your diary my eyelashes don’t bat sootily enough.Such a lummox could never rumple the sheets of Paris

To think I used to be so good at going to pieces gobbling my way through the cops and spooking what’s left of the girls. How’d I get so far, sloughing off one knuckle at a time, jerking my mossy pelt along ruined streets? Those insistent, dreadful thuds when we stacked our futile selves against locked doors. Our mumbles and groans! Such hungry nights! Staggering through the grit of looted malls, plastered with tattered flags of useless currency, I’d slobbered all over the busted glass and merchandise of America ... But first you’ll have to figure out those qualities separating what’s being alive from who’s already dead. Most of you will flunk that. Next learn how to want one thing over and over, night after night. Most of you are good at that. Don’t get tired. Don’t cough into your leftovers. Don’t think. Always stand by your hobgoblin buddies. Clutch at whatever’s there. Learn to sniff out sundowns.