i’m asking for a friend,
but you don’t know them
so please don’t ask,
though maybe you could, i don’t know,
in fact, lemme tell you so we can skip
the rest of this rigmarole,
and get on with our day,
but i gotta warn ya, you’re not going to know this friend,
you know, the friend for whom i’m asking,
though if you do know them, maybe don’t go around tellin’
capeesh!
do you think the other customers of home depot will notice that i forgot to put on deodorant before
going to the store to buy a new door knob because a guest
that both my wife and i were unfamiliar with decided to open
our front door a bit too aggressively
and broke the inner bolt where the key supposedly locks us inside our house
with nothing to do but spend countless nights romanticizing our present for the future,
or do you think the other customers won’t care about my body odor,
because perhaps they’re more concerned by the fact that i had a car accident
before arriving at home depot and part of my body,
a significant part, more than i care to discuss here,
is covered in blood and bruises and i’m slowly dying in the plumbing aisle
while a scissor lift cordoned off the store from witnessing my death crawling all over their products
i made a quick list of all the things i wanted to do
in a day, then promptly forgot where i put that list,
and instead did my own thing,
which i’m fairly certain i explicitly said not to do in my
original list
Fred Aiken Writing 