TO LIZZY Thanks to you I’ve become a Facebook stalker. Every day, I Google you five or ten times just to look for any ideas to help with getting you back. Now I know that your newest boyfriend, Lucius — I remember hearing him swear he’d write for Time “or something bigger than that” before his thirtieth birthday — just turned thirty-one, and he’s still reporting hometown news, the same little rag, writing shit about Kiwanis and geriatrics’ restaurant ideas — “Take-Out Goes Gourmet” — he’s a chump, a numbnuts! James K. Baxter nailed it: he called newspapers worthless, good for nothing but tablecloths and toilet paper. I don’t have a job with insurance, family money, blow, or a Porsche, but if you leave him, Lizzy, I’ll write hundreds of poems that make you come when you read them. * TO LUCIUS Lucius, I know you love it now: the sun shines, you make hay, and I can hear her moans all night from seven states away. You must be a ferocious stud to keep her entertained for two whole months. But soon enough, she’ll have you chained like an old dog in a muddy yard. Even if you can do it ten times in a single night, easy, she’ll hold you to it until you can’t go on, and while you sleep, flat-broke and drained, she’ll sneak off to another man, with higher grade cocaine than yours. I never liked you slick, spoiled types — I won’t deny it — but call me when she does you in. You’ll need a drink. I’ll buy it. * ALL THE BIG NAMES ON FACEBOOK Sarah’s “friended” dozens of famous poets: National Book Awards, Pulitzer Prizes, US Laureates and McArthur Fellows — even a Nobel! Surely she can’t have met them all in person, even at the largest and most prestigious writers’ conferences, which she attends yearly, summer and winter. Yet she comments tirelessly on their timelines: birthday wishes, kudos for their collections, flattery for their babies, giddy tributes praising their readings: “OMG! You cracked me up at Bread Loaf, improvising that line about the ocean flipping off the tourists in the Bahamas — then I was sobbing!” God knows why they never seem to “unfriend” her; why, instead, they “like” her transparent comments, often as not replying with some witty self-deprecation. Given the time she wastes fawning on Facebook, is there any wonder her poems are puerile, stilted, inarticulate, hackneyed, dull and hugely successful? Just this morning, she posted an announcement: Random House will publish her fourth collection in as many years. Ninety-three people “like” it already. * TO FRED Out with it, Fred, you filthy dog! Your Facebook friends are in a rage over these oh-so-subtle hints across your page: pics of a rose, glasses of wine, and sunsets. Now this sly cliché — “I’m even seeing my backyard in a new way!” — posted the day your status changed from “Single” to that hackneyed hedge: “It’s complicated.” Either jump or leave the ledge! Unless she’s married, or a beast, or an imaginary squeeze designed to prick another girl with jealousies, you’d share her pics day in, day out with no discretion (don’t forget how hard you fell last time around: we’ve watched you sweat.) What do you gain by clamming up? Link to her page at least, or post a few bikini pics that prove she’s not a ghost. Surely you trust your Facebook pals. If you’d just put us to the test, I promise not even to send a friend request without permission. Love won’t last if it’s a secretive affair. I want to sing of yours in verse and share, share, share.
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