Nate Slawson is bad motherfucker. Not only does he do this, but he also writes these. Nate's a friend of a friend whom I've only met a couple of times, but he can grow a wicked mustache and write totally rad poems. The odd for me about reading Slawson's poems, though, is that our styles are oddly familiar. He uses a bit more curse words than I do, but the phrasing is almost exact (i.e. long run-on sentences that take advantage of time-buying verbage to create space where there technically is none), and the things he chooses to write about isn't necessarily what I choose to write about, but the loose yet logical flow of ideas is also quite similar.

Appetizers are my favorite part of the meal and its a joy to share them with you...

you are a pharmacy

you have a hundred secret names & I am the world’s worst shoplifter.
you know what I mean? it’s like it’s 1992 & we’re so happy for cigarettes
& de la soul & lightning bugs & shit like that. sometimes I wish you knew
someone exactly like me who wasn’t so obsessed with your knuckles.
they make me hurt like alligator teeth. I want you to be all fists & bruises like
tiny sparrows on my face. I want you to be a handgun muzzled into my gut

I've always thought that I made more sense on paper, that my best ways of saying things aloud confused people and I get that same feeling from Slawson's poems...that, you can imagine hearing someone speaking this poem, but if spoken to you outside the context of poetry, you'd be pretty feaked out.

Something unrelated, I've totally fallen for the XYZ Affair.

Topic at hand...go read Nate Slawson's poetry and then go buy his books, his beautiful books and do what I did and wear the free pin everywhere.