a wedding of first cousins

andy pink, philadelphia, penn —

“stand tall,” she said —

my office in kohlberg hall at swarthmore — like a barn for a lone stallion — is the likely spot for the late spring wedding, after the soviet’s red sun has given up on us and walt’s pluto returns from abandoned confusion, before the blue jays and the heady wasps have displaced the wing-tipped birds and the negroid bees, here we will wrap ourselves in the soiled blanket of jealousy and relief — “i had given up,” the mother wails — they will look on — from outside, down and in, from the courtyard and its chop a chop, small students and big heads, unfortunate collections of rented books and shaved pencils, ready to be resold, left at the doorstep of a spinster whose only memory of existence is an early-morning abortion and a late-term miscarriage — here, at kohlberg, at swarthmore, i will extract my love for him from a place that bill clinton once called hope, arkansas — and here we will be: “yes i said yes i will yes.” he will gaze at me, dreaming of teal board shorts and cheap sunny d and say: “i know that hack reference, i am unimpressed, and they should have dismantled your tenure-track position before you played hearts with a sophomore whose name rhymes with yes” —

and i say, “yes, yes — you will always be my third love, my second murder, and my first suicide.”

clergy-willing — a fourth item up for bid will come along — and with that, no doubt: a $1 bid. betwixt you, me, and the security staff — head high, knees bent — i taste you for the second time (once removed) — for whom? — for the joys of the perverse voyeurs of the glossy cover of the digital edition of the fourth issue of rolling stone. what itunes for pc, photoshop for mac, and free conde naste archives on subscription can do for you, too!

my parents are first cousins. my father committed suicide — “took his own life” — in the mid-80s after a series of fallouts with various attorneys who were hired to slip counterfeit bills to an insurance company that would be the one to pay out — pay up listen up turn up chin up fuck up buck up — : to pay for the social worker’s mistake to cut him loose — en noose, i like to joke to friends in text — from the mental l’hopital generale. and so, as the rope burns around my father’s neck in a size medium grave beyond trotter and parish, we can all admit: you can’t bum a cigarette from liberty mutual and her geico beneficiaries without a clear choice of words: “a mistake, yes, but one by which i will die for” — and so: i would like to say this to my haters and layers: you — try to suck dick while waiting for an insurance payout for premeditated deinstitutionalized insensitive preorganic (“transitional”) homicide! not all insurance claims are processed by whole foods directly! and, be sensitive — it’s stressful.

i would have liked to have attended (assuming: +1) the wedding of my mother and father. it should come as a repeated and cringed expectation that my guest would be patrick. my mother would have loved patrick — she still does, protestant commitments notwithstanding — and i think my father would have reveled with delight, not least because he could experience rivalrous love for the love of his life. it is certainly a reasonable hypothesis to consider: did my father “take his own life” (as my mother would say in her book of poetry on the matter) — did my father wrap chords around his neck and vomit at the local starbucks — because he was jealous of my love for patrick? — of my patrick, who will henceforth be referred to as: “p-trick.” it would come to that: in the backyard of the old mill condo in canton, there we would be, legs up on the broken picnic table that was chained and padlocked to the dying embers of section 8 housing: the three of us, stained skivvies and washed indigo, comparing and contrasting and exchanging — as one might do at a nearby cash register or a local chapter 11 bankruptcy hearing — to swap insights and inquisitions about our three penises — on a balmy day no less — out back, below the kitchen and her stained windows, adjacent to my childhood bedroom and his treehouse that even the extended family of the berenstein bears would refuse to properly erect — here, in the river down by the trailer, no metonymies intended — here, it would be said: “son, you have the prettiest penis of all.”

when there are two guys around — often: father and son — it really is no matter the nicer penis. the question really only confronts when the third love of your life — who is a barista — is triple-dipped into a family of tobacco victims. if patrick and i had agreed, quickly — as if we had ever spoken, let’s say — to respond that my father’s penis was of course the finest dick on the dial, no worries for three grown men on display at the family picnic table — without the keys to the combination lock! if you learn anything from this overpriced repaginated off-print of the hardcover edition in spanish translation, it is this: do not forget the keys for the combination for the padlock that tethers the broken picnic table to an inner city public housing unit that you can never in fact own for yourself — why? — because the civil rights act of 1964 and the voting rights act of 1965 prohibit only one final dimension: blackness. my advice, admittedly, is spare and sparse, but when it is gifted: do write it down, in ink.

my father said that i had the most beautiful penis at the picnic table. patrick said that i had the most beautiful penis at the picnic table. i said that my father had the most beautiful penis at the picnic table. but it was agreed: patrick was the third, a lovely bother and capable servant — would my love for my father’s penis keep him from the dusty garage, the grandfather’s buick, and the table of sundry ropes and tempting threads that lay before him one afternoon, as i was watching lucifer and pluto cartoons a bit aways, as he must have said to himself: “but if i could only fuck my student” —

i would like to underscore, if you read the first sentence of the fifth paragraph in haste: my parents are first cousins. to some, such is the indulgence of white trash that not even the underlord of a tribal pack of nitwits would engage with, a priori. but to us — those who exclusively read wordpress rather than tumblr unless instragram is online again — to us, white men in the pressed top coats of public school in essex — in the western and northern hemispheres, to put a geographical if not geopolitical coordinate to the point: i am but shameless royalty. you are reading the text of royalty: 149, 6′, blond, 7″ cut, prince. please remember such the next time you swap out this safari tab for teeny-bopper porn and a powerpoint file. on point: i am thinking of converting the book into a keynote file. is this just a trendy way of procrastinating on the book prospectus?

no phone calls please!

i will return a bit later after starbucks and trader j’s — but in summary: i have the most beautiful penis in the galaxy since the murder of pluto and his proleptic penis. and now her (re)turn!

coffee tastes terrible when enjoyed in the morning,

a k pinkster

but you’ve got to wonder: what will the color scheme for the wedding be? oh dear, whatever the scheme of his board shorts that morning, i suppose.

i must hope the whole foods refund check doesn’t bounce. this is all to say: at the final calculations of the last breath, what could a refund possibly be if both of us can no longer swallow? and then patrick will say, so quietly: “doesn’t matter — it’s behind door number three.”

three dreams, three men, like only j crew knows how to suffer, sell, and return to mender.