-after Michael Hurley
Have mercy on me mister
In dog years I’m dead
In tortoise years I’m a child
The carrion along the highway portend a world beyond industry
Sanitation workers preach subaltern enlightenment
Don’t stop me now
A killer guitar solo played on a zither
It’s Oktoberfest after all
Everyone is doing their best Herzog impression
I don’t want to live in a world where there are no lions anymore
I’m late to the New Wave but y’know in a cute way
Or no it’s the cruelest month
Or no it’s the coolest moth
Or wait the crudest math
You see I’m not fit for execution
Put me on grill duty or book burning
These galoshes are no match for the deluge
The hazmat erases our most compelling contours
Is this the genderless future you feared?
A united voice box
Listen I’m not polyamorous either but the rent is getting out of control
What if you and I––you know
My partner’s stuck in jury duty I may never see her again
I am the opposite of an enemy
Oops I mean apposite
Acolyte of enmity
Enervated too
This shit’s exhausting.
Is it Christmas yet?
My melancholy’s due for renewal
My partner’s reading Proust I may never see her again
Wire me a million maravedis and I’ll keep a secret
Wiretap my phone and I’ll prove it
Halve mercy on me miser
Bring back disco at least
Sequins and sweat and seraphim
And quaaludes
Give us quaaludes and we’ll guillotine ourselves
We need a public forum
I mean a pubic forearm
I mean a Punic foreman
Something antiquated to get me through the night
The mise-en-scène of predictable dénouement
A kopek for my conscription
A kleenex for my congestion
A codex of hexes
I mean hoaxes
Marry me mister before I lose my conviction
Convenience fees like a lake of fire
Backdrafts and overdrafts and conspiracies of fraud
Convict me master before I get into mercy
Caught my double helix in my zipper again
which made for an awkward seminar
Swift shifts in form––suddenly donkey
alone on the vertex of Freytag’s pyramid
fearful of the falling action
Yes it’s gotten that bad
I sweat day and night
drafting an indisputable syllogism
only to realize I’ve ripped off
Rodney Dangerfield
And the migraines are back
making mincemeat
of my limbic system
An exit also functions as an entrance
It’s agonizing trying to leave
the movie theater and being pushed
out on stage to deliver glib rhetoric
to Communists with trust funds
“There are only two political parties,”
I tell the crowd,
“those who ban the DSM-5
and those who fetishize it.”
And they cheer ignorant
to which position I hold
I paint horses now
except they end up looking like 1099 forms
One friend tells me this is a symptom
of autism another says it’s cancer
another says I’m probably pregnant
I propose Occam’s razor and they cancel me
from the group chat—all of my best nudes obliterated
My treatise that stipulates masks
must be worn during coitus
is scrutinized by my advisors
for being redundant
When was the last day we went without rain?
Where did I park my chariot?
Who was my mother when she was free?
The unionists organize without me
The organists unionize without me
The older I get the more I worry that I’m a spy
The light in February is terrible
wan and constipated
Absolutely no one is getting laid—
you can tell by their groceries
Athletes in an ambulatory huddle
conceal their desire for the world
the whole way back to the locker room
where they’ll whip one another
with their wet towels
I scrape the bargain bin for scraps of mirth
Red bananas, glass octopus
My new wife’s handsome dowry
The weight of indolence like a precious metal
My itinerant dog in the field with her sniveling itch
Histrionic crocus in the grey dirt, a crude, Lacanian triptych
with its subliminal allegations of my most private interests
I’ll be honest I paid the lad fifty quid
for a good tickle and I’d do it again
We slip swiftly into the fat ass of the parabola,
our skirts fly over our heads like whirling samaras
On the shortwave radio
a Swedish composer plays
an adagio upon a weeping fig
What follows is a very middling performance
of snow, a wash of blue wind
and then silence
In the middle of the night, a cat screams for its life—
its terror unmistakably human
Eric Tyler Benick wrote Terracotta Fragments (Antiphony, 2026) and the fox hunts (Beautiful Days, 2023). He is a founding editor of Ursus Americanus Press, a publisher of shorter poetics. His work has appeared in Apartment, Bennington Review, Chicago Review, Copper Nickel, Harvard Advocate, Puerto Del Sol, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.
