White Like Me

“Milkhead.” Moonskins and clears. Always liked Clorox.

Sharpton-negatives. Cocaine-white sugar-whipped cream-Irish butt-cumulus cloud face. “Gabacho” just rolls off the tongue—the “ass” is implied, no?

Powder blank pages. “White people”—with an appropriate touch of ice, acid and annoyance. Whitey McWhitester? Kansas. Mouse. Honkubine Pimples.

Whatever happened to Gringo? Southern fried pimpin’. Ivory League. Schmoo(s). Straight outta the Upper East Side. Vacuous, self-entitled, puritanical, scarlet letter-bearing sinners.

Pillow case. Bruncher. Nilla. Pigmentally-challenged Mayonnaisian.

Shatners. Blanco Bill. Bradies. Boss.

I got a lot of “chalky” tossed at me. Teeth-white out-fancy couch that kids don't sit on-head? Pinkskins. Liquid Paper. #FFFFFF. Milky.

The Manson clan used the simple “whitey,” but that was because that's all they could remember. Snowflake. Cracker. Nosferatu-ites. What's up with it, vanilla face? Bleachies, incandescents and fish bellies.

Hillbilly. Kook. Saltine slack-jaw yakoo. Honky-honky and dead honky. Lattes. Also— “Hipster.” Wipes.

Charmin hockey players? All Presidents So Far. I've always appreciated “larvae.” Wonder Bread and meringue Caspers. Polar CareBears. Sports socks. Neds.

Stealing My Teenage Death Poetry

I don’t know why, exactly, but something inspired me to search for the first line of one of my oldest, most horribly written poems that I put up on the Internet when I was 15 (I wrote it when I was 13).

It was gothic teenage death poetry. Bad gothic teenage death poetry. You know, the ones that say, when translated out of all the gothic language, “Oh, woe is me, I am going to kill myself, because nobody understands me, and I am dead anyway.” They use darkness and death a lot. Yeah. Those teenage death poems.

No, don’t bother looking; it is not anywhere on this site, nor will it ever be.

I found this poem on FOUR SITES. Only one of those sites had actually credited it to my Internet name. All of the other sites were homepages where the author claimed it as her own. One girl even used that poem as the splash page, the entry page to her entire site. All of them had little copyright notices on it, saying that they wrote it and if anyone stole it they would sue that person. One girl even had several sentences at the bottom about how mean it would be for someone to steal it.

This amused me for two reasons.

One: All of these girls were sooo self-righteous and indignant about copyright when they themselves were stealing my poem and putting their names on it.

Two: That poem is quite possibly the worst poem that I have ever written.

Poem

Once you accept the fact that people are their biographies
you can pretty much skip around. For instance,

suppose poet X will write a poem that will kick your own poetry's
ass on one of the pages of the future. Bad luck

for you, right? Wrong. B/c you will have read about it before
it has even happened, can in fact STEAL the ass-kicking poem

for yourself! Sure, it will be an empty victory, knowing
as you do that X wrote the ass-kicking poem, and not you.

But, at least it won't be your ass being kicked!