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Everyone’s 2016 Sucked

Bowie died while I was in jail.

By Joke MarfskyPublished 6 years ago 3 min read
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I leave Baker’s, a week and a half into the new year, Sunday night; after a double at the theater.

I'm on my way down Leavenworth, king-size doobie for a king-size shift, I have purchased a bottle of wine for my sorrows and some vegan ‘thingies’ for my ex-girlfriend/roommate, and now there's a cyclist on the road, and I'm going to just swoop around you and— Oh shit.

Fuck.

“Hello sir, do you know why I pulled you over?”

No, I was actually curious of that myself?

A rattle tap-tap comes from my passenger side window. The second officer is using his flashlight as the international signal to roll-it-down, but my window was frozen shut.

“You know your car smells like pot, right?”

Oh, this car?

The window finally gives. "You know we could smell your car from down the street, pal."

Is that why I was pulled over?

The anxiety begins to roll, like the sweat beading at the brow of my hairline.

“No, we pulled you over, sir," looking down at me like the roach he knows I just put out, "because your headlights weren't on.”

The officer at my driver side window asks me to step out of the vehicle; the anxiety that prevented me from performing at the previous nights poetry slam swells.

I am asked to put out my cigarette and stand by the squad car. I do so without hesitation. The investigation of Burt's ratty insides becomes my reality as I stand in the bitter frost of the brand new year, 2016. Which was rung in just a weekend prior by taking LSD and MDMA. Candy-flippin'. Tripping plus rolling I prefer to call it trolling.

Where were these cops then when I was going much too fast struggling way too hard to avoid running into my ex who I was still so desperately in love with.

The cop undergoing the search finds the king-size roach I ditched in my trash bag.

As I stand in the cold, I feel my body fighting with nature. The sweat continues to rage. Knowing that the drugs I had too much anxiety to take the night prior, after the slam, were still stuffed in my iPhone 6s box, stuffed inside a gym bag that screams, HEY THIS GUY DOES DRUGS! And it's only a matter of time until someone says,

"Jackpot. White powdery substance. Probably cocaine."

It's actually MDMA. I snark out. Cooperation becomes as binding as the cuffs they snap around my backside. My breathing becomes sharp. The cafeteria voices in my head turn into a concert hall of:

Worthless.

Pathetic.

You should've ran.

Why didn't you eat that shit when you saw the lights?

As I cry uncontrollably in the back of a squad car, uncomfortable is the only word. I scream about how I can't breathe. Not in politics. Not in hope.

In lack of control. The officer calls an ambulance. Upon its arrival: I am removed from the car, the paramedic asks what's the problem with my breathing, and I let loose one line, and the mans face sinks. He immediately wishes there was something he could actually do. With my head shaking and tears sweltering down my face: it's mental.

The arresting officer waves off the ambulance and then reassures my most foolish question, that he cannot give me a hug. I am placed back in the car. We're taking you down to county.

I spend the next two days in jail, in the DCC's "god mod," after being classified as: a danger to myself and others. Me, a white, non-violent ‘male’, self-medicating, ex-military-brat, queer-as-folk, quasi-poet, psychotically depressed/schizophrenic whose pastime is mindfulness dissociation, felon.

2016. New year, new me, right?

slam poetry
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About the Creator

Joke Marfsky

NE poet. 26. Aspiring filmmaker. Bartender by trade. Mentally inverted metro-pan/asexual.

📷@jk.marv 🐥@marfsky

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