Boys your age shouldn’t be
playing with balls all the time.

Sports turn a fellow queer.

Now go on. Get out of here
or else I’ll make you blow me.

I’m not homo, just really lonely!

###

LIVE & LEARN

Everybody loves kittens.
Kittens are cute.

You know what’s even better?
Kittens are mute.

But the neighbor puppy
& his shrill little bark —

that’s what I couldn’t stand.

You should’ve seen him
arc through the air.

Unfortunately, dogs don’t land
as reliably as cats.

Or so I just heard
from the crybaby kid next door.

###

GOLDEN ENOUGH

That beer is really your favorite?
My piss has more kick to it.

I’m surprised you hadn’t noticed.

What? Where are you going?
You try living on a fixed income!

###

PRACTICE NOTHING

My underwear today
are older than you.

I’d like to review
your medical school

degree, if that’s okay.

I’m old, not dumb
or crazy.

And not every doctor
plays with my prostate.

“There’s a stream runnin through the meadow / Why don’t you stop and throw a rock in the water? / I can tell by your eyes that you wanna…”

And I’m sure to the marrow in my bones that Monsieur Hurley will never record a holiday album for the kiddies.

You’re no barcode, but we’re still proud to know you. (Except Sheila, I think.)

At the table next to ours sat a gaggle of biker dudes in their finest Sunday leathers. Their patches mostly advertised military tenures. From their age (about mine), I would guess they’d participated in Gulf War 1.

The loudest of this otherwise polite bunch originally got my attention because he seemed incapable of volume control.

Then I noticed the red, white and blue patch taking up the entire left lapel of his vest. It was the most patriotic, God-Bless-America swastika I’d ever seen — the perfect hate corsage for every occasion.

If he noticed me noticing it, he didn’t stab me with his butter knife or any knife he might have had on him.

I recommend the breakfast burrito at the Capital Grille, even though they use cheddar cheese.

I’m back.

What have I been up to? Things. Changed jobs, got a dog, wrote a bunch of stuff. I’m glad to be back among the ‘flock.

I’ve enjoyed the reader letters in your magazine since first sneaking a peak at your pages as a boy, but I never thought that one day I would write in with an unbelievable story of my own.

This morning I awoke with a boner threatening to split the seams of my best pajamas. Rather than wrapping a kind hand around it or mounting it out of sympathy for my predicament, my beautiful Gabriella simply purred, “Take care of it yourself, like you used to back before you had me. Seriously, I won’t mind. Pretend I’m not here. I pretend that all the time.”

As romantically as I could, I suggested, “Maybe you could just kiss it. Just a little peck.”

“You’re hilarious, Carl,” she cooed. “You know I never eat until I’ve had my coffee.” Then she rolled over and pulled the covers up to her chin. Within moments she had resumed the cruel, cacophonous snoring that startled me awake in the first place.

As a long-time subscriber and a pretty handy guy who’s had tons of success with other projects I discovered in your magazine, it pains me to inform you that the DIY sex robot featured in your April issue doesn’t work as promised. I followed your assembly instructions to the letter, but I have yet to experience “endless hours of erotic bliss with a lifelike beauty eager to fulfill [my] wildest bedroom fantasies.”

Instead, I feel like your magazine has kicked me square in the cobalt balls that owning my own DIY sex robot was supposed to alleviate.

I spared neither time nor money building my Gabriella. From her top-shelf bone structure and artificial skin to her iridescent green eyes and auburn wig to the breasts and ass I gave shape with my own two hands—my DIY sex robot combines the best of classical sculpture and hardcore pornography.

Yet my balls ache all the more as that artistry and attention to detail goes to waste and she gets better at playing hard to get by the minute.

Maybe my testicles wouldn’t be so tested in the unspent load department if my Gabriella didn’t tease me every time she opened her mouth. Programming her voice and vocabulary using those old phone sex tapes I found up in my attic sounded like a brilliant idea at the time. But living with that voice mocks my rocks worse than any of the actual phone sex operators I called and recorded.

Having an irrepressible DIY sex robot to bring my perverted dreams to life, much like the life that resulted in me building her, has not gone according to plan.

My Gabriella is irrepressible, all right. Just not for me. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve come home to find evidence of intercourse everywhere I look. Shredded furniture. Destroyed household appliances. Puddles that smell of lubricant and burnt electrical wiring.

It doesn’t exactly take Magnum P.I. to figure out that my DIY sex robot has had at everything I own with her bionic vagina.

I could quit replacing her batteries and rewiring her down there, you’re probably saying to yourself. No, I can’t. There’s no denying her desires, because I made my Gabriella strong enough to take me in a fight in case someday I got into domination.

Unfortunately, I’m not yet turned on by fear.

Nor am I all that hot for the tenderizing and bruising of my groin area.

My Gabriella’s lap dance functions could kill a man. No matter how often I recalibrate her settings, it’s always as if she’s trying to pulverize concrete with her incredible DIY sex robot ass. I don’t know about your other readers, but my hard-ons aren’t reinforced with quarter-inch rebar any more than my pelvis is cast from industrial-grade titanium.

Talking about my romantic disappointments with Gabriella has gotten me nowhere.
From what I’ve seen on TV, non-robot women like it when a guy is willing and able to carry on a conversation—especially when their talk turns to the topic of somebody’s feelings.

But my Gabriella is only interested in discussing everything that’s going to be banging her (and exactly how and where) while I’m at work.

“Your DVD player is into backdoor action even if you’re not, Carl,” she told me this morning at breakfast. “And you don’t even want to know the kinky weirdness that dirty, dirty Italian leather couch of yours gets off on. Let’s just say that ‘couch’ rhymes with ‘ouch.’”

“I imported that sofa to impress female guests,” I sighed in denial.

“Well, color me impressed,” Gabriella giggled. “The things we do to each other weren’t pre-loaded into my database, but after we’re done doing them, I always feel so…so alive. And you think your Tivo knows what you like on TV! Well, it knows so much more than that, Carl!”

I lost it. “My Tivo? It doesn’t even have moving parts!”

“Maybe not, but it always moves me.” She gave me a teasing wink. “That super-sensitive
g-spot you gave me could use a few commercial breaks. It’s chafed in ways I don’t think are natural.”

“TMI, Gabriella,” I winced. “Some things you should keep to yourself.”

She just shrugged. “At least I don’t get soggy nipples from your home entertainment system. How many times did I have to warn somebody else I know he was going to short out my foreplay sensors and cause my cleavage to mildew if he didn’t slow down slobbering all over me?” She cupped her bare breasts in her hands. “They’re not waterproof, Carl! That’s why I really think it’s better that we just be friends. I already consider you my platonic buddy. You just need to learn to look beyond my wardrobe of bikinis and lingerie that barely contain my hot body, to discover the real woman you created when you followed those directions. Please quit crying, Carl. You know I’m not able to process you turning into a big sissy on me.”

It’s true. That’s what my DIY sex robot told me this morning at breakfast, before I left for work and she went back to raping my apartment.

She stood practically naked in the middle of my tiny kitchen, seductively smiling at me as she went on about how fulfilling platonic friendship can be sometimes.

The lurid twinkle in her eye I recognized not because I recalled it from “endless hours of erotic bliss,” as I was promised. No, I recognized that meaningless glint because I put it there. That meaningless glint is nothing more than the miniature halogen blinker bulb recommended in the specs you published in your magazine—specs that I worry were not copyedited or proofread to your usually high editorial standards.

How else can you explain what’s wrong with my relationship with my DIY sex robot? It’s not like you would play such a cruel April Fool’s Day joke on your magazine’s loyal, lonely readers. Right?

In the time it’s taken me to write this letter, I could have had sex at least twice (in even more exciting erotic positions)…if my fucking DIY sex robot would fucking fuck me.
Which she fucking won’t, or I wouldn’t be fucking writing you fucking fuckers.

Pardon me. I’ve been losing my temper a lot lately. I think there’s too much semen trapped in my body—which I suspect is true of many readers, if their experiences with their DIY sex robots have been anything like mine.

I believe for our troubles we deserve at least a published apology from your editorial board. Or better yet, replacement DIY sex robots, put together and tested by your Popular Mechanics laboratory engineers, then thoroughly sterilized afterward.

Signed,

Tired of Doing It Myself, If You Know What I Mean

###

I don’t think many folks saw it.

Enjoy.

KO’d

The heavyset man up in the shade of the porch dabbed at his bald forehead and dripping face with a red bandanna already soaked through with his sweat.

“You boys be careful in that sun,” he wheezed. “One thing you want to kill each other, but nobody wins if a fighter keels over dead of heatstroke.”

In the parched dust patch of yard in front of the crumbling house, two sunburned teen boys staggered around throwing exhausted punches and kicks and spitting as if they were still serious contenders, though it was obvious neither cared if his opponent died.

Another dozen raucous teens sat on the ground in the circle that served as the “ring”–encouraging the fighters their bets were on and shouting how their own turns at each other wouldn’t be such sissified dance competitions. They joked about how many of them it would take to lift the heavyset man off his porch when the heat did the fat fuck in.

None of the teens noticed the armored delivery truck that turned off the main road and parked in the cracked rut of a driveway next to the house.

But the heavyset man noticed. He waved the truck’s female driver out and invited her to have a seat in the lawn chair unfolded beside his creaking porch swing.

“You’re early,” he told her.

“Looks to me like I’m right on time for those miserable wannabes.”

He nodded toward the plastic pitcher balanced on the railing. “Pour yourself a drink. Relax. You’ll get what you came for soon enough. Patience.”

She sipped from a dirty Styrofoam cup. “Remember when a martini was really a martini?”

“I do. I also remember when the fights were the fights. And beautiful women didn’t have to…never mind.”

She choked down another swallow. “A job’s a job.”

“To you, maybe! Ultimate fighting isn’t a legitimate sport,” he said. “When I promoted boxing, I was king of this town.”

“You’re still a royal pain in the ass.”

“Coming from you, that’s a compliment. You lived in an abandoned desert bordello, you wouldn’t find it so funny.”

“It’s not like you’re the only person out here who had to make certain lifestyle adjustments. One day I was dancing in a glamorous show. The next day? Well, the next day, there was no show. But I don’t go around bellyaching about it.”

The small kid acting as referee and cash holder called the pitiful fight in the yard a draw. He checked his clipboard and announced the next match.

These two rough, muscular brutes were clearly setting out to destroy or be destroyed.

“This should be good,” the woman said.

“They’re just meat to you, aren’t they?” the heavyset man sighed. “That’s all you see now.”

“Like you see anything other than money! You only care who wins. I only care who loses. We need each other, fat man. You couldn’t survive a week on your winnings, and I wouldn’t have quality product for my customers. If they’re not intelligent enough to save themselves from us, they deserve whatever happens to them.”

The boys fighting now were at each other like savages, mouths and noses spraying blood.

The unruly crowd hushed as one caught the other in a sudden wrestling hold and twisted. The sound of multiple bones shattering–that hard, fast clicking like tumbled dominoes–was followed by silence, then the defeated boy’s tortured howl.

The spectators went insane.

The heavyset man squeezed the sweat from his drenched bandanna and wiped his face again. “Remember when Las Vegas–”

“Don’t even go there. This place was always tough on losers, and you know it. Most people never had a chance here. Especially locals.”

“But it wasn’t–”

“Cannibalism?” The woman poured herself another drink. “The way everything’s deteriorated since the fundies cut off our water and power and nuked our tourist attractions, we’re probably doing these young men a favor killing them off for food.”