One Day, Joe Pettini Will Show Them All

One day, Joe Pettini will show them all …

Joe Pettini’s far-off gaze — it smoulders at the today about him just as it aches for the tomorrow before him. He is, for miserable now, a Le Tigre wearer lost in a remorseless hierarchy of Those Who Don Privileged Izods. Whatever mastery the lunchroom table — that steering committee of knaves, where he is not welcome — holds over Joe Pettini, it is as fugitive as the pupa.

The ribs of Joe Pettini encase not only a mighty heart, but also a concrete intake facility — painted in mute, industrial gray, the color of Prussia’s lost battles. Inside that cell subsists Joe Pettini’s numbed will. It is disembodied save for two crispy fingers, and those fingers, each night, summon the hardihood to scrawl a prisoner’s tally of the crudest hours until July 10, 1980.

On that day, all will be shown because Joe Pettini will show them all.

So assail him for now, invertebrates of the homerooms and hallways, but know this: the hunches you mock are the very wounds from which Joe Petini’s thunderclap wings will grow. You shall know him by his talons.