Sometimes I think of all the people in the world
I’d like to smack. Like our current, trashy, goon
of a president with all his stupid words and all
his stupid fucking hate. I think of all the people
helping him take the country back in time to the
age of stone and ruthless assholes and I’d like to
smack them too. I’d like to smack those border
patrol thugs in their drab uniforms grinning their
dumb grins, smashing up the food and supplies
left for refugees crossing into the American night
on foot through the desert; I’d like to smack anyone
who thinks we should build a wall between us and
Mexico, when the only walls we should be building
are for a room where we can throw all the hedge
fund managers and all the other financial advisors of
the apocalypse. But it’s not just these obviously evil
people I want to smack, I want to smack a lot of other
people too. People who are pretty much innocent but
who make things difficult in curious ways. I’d like to
smack all my friends who did a little too much cocaine
in the 80s, because half of them are still doing stupid
shit in their lives and the other half owe me money.
I’d like to smack my old friends who made it big and
now avoid me like a dog turd on the sidewalk during
a light afternoon rain. I’d like to smack Owen Wilson
for starring in the movie Behind Enemy Lines. My wife
and I saw it in the theater when it came out in 2001.
It wasn’t very good. I’d like to smack some guy, any
guy, named Maurice, because I don’t like the name
Maurice and I’m not impressed by whatever connection
he has to the pompatus of love. I’d like to smack the
poet who first wrote the lines “if it’s yellow let it mellow,
if it’s brown flush it down.” I know, it’s encouraging
people to save water but I hate that poem, so fuck it.
And OK, maybe I’m just jealous. I’d like to smack myself
sometimes, because sometimes I feel like I’m just so
fucking clever when I’m really not so fucking clever.
I hate it when I’m deceiving myself that way. And I’m
going to walk, like I’m a hundred feet tall, into a room
showing off my gas-powered, gold tooth grill, as fast as
I feel it but in slow, barely-perceived motion to the
crowd, sipping their drinks, speaking endlessly of the
intricate relations of superficial things. Because I am
now a planet, formed over vast lengths of time through
the accretion of stardust to dust, a cosmic smacking of
one object to another, a daisy chain of anger and reaction.
I bow down before no one. I have a pebble in my shoe.

-Jose Padua

Photograph by Jose Padua