This Rock is Trash!: Feed by Tommy Pico

Timmy Pico is a queer, native American poet, living in New York City, trying to navigate the dating scene while constantly being on the road for his profession. His long poem, Feed, reads just like that—a feed of his character’s mind which he calls “Teebs” and all of the personal thoughts that occupy it: “I am 34/ I live in the busiest city in America./ I am about to eat an orange./ Every feed owes itself to death. Poetry is feed/ to the horses within me.”

Pieces of short verse are alternated with prose, dialogue, letters, short recipes, news headlines and lists, all of which showcase Pico’s clever, astute, surprising and hilarious writing. He brings up many melancholy topics–lost love, his heritage, the American president, climate change and his loneliness–but he manages to take each of these things in stride and press forward with his uncanny ability to find humor in nearly every situation.

As a sort of loose organization of the poem, Pico provides a soundtrack to his thoughts; Track 1 is a the song”XO” by Beyonce and Track 19 is “Up the Ladder to the Roof” by the Supremes. He reflects briefly on the lyrics from each track and his subsequent thoughts are launched from there until he “starts” the next track. A clever and subtle way to keep some semblance of form to his meandering thought-feed. Track 12 is my favorite in the playlist:

Track 12: “Shout” by Tears for Fears. First of all, best band name in
America. Second, how cathartic am I right? Really, just let it all out.
What else can ou do in an intractable situation but to shout? Focus
on that full throaty wail where Roland Orzabal reveals the he’s just
waiting for the lover to open up for the destruction his love will no
doubt wreak.

Teebs is not afraid to be brutally honest about his sexual desires, his sometimes awkward dates, and the reasons why he moves on from a relationship (In one instance he finds out that his lover’s favorite book is Atlas Shrugged) But the love interest that is brought up most is a man named Leo, whom we meet in the opening verses of the poem. Leo and Teebs share some nice memories together, but Teebs doesn’t wallow in or become awash with sorrow when they mutually decide to go their separate ways. His relationship with Leo forms a part of the larger patterns in his life—his loneliness, his struggles with dating, and his itinerant lifestyle as a traveling poet. He deftly moves from the very personal—the story of his first meeting with Leo—to more universal, even philosophical, thoughts on love and loneliness:

Ok so in Plato’s Symposium
the philosopher Aristophanes makes
this speech at some white
robe
sweaty ball
table line dinner
about the origin of love.

That at one point
there were three sexes:
the children of the sun (two men)
the children of the earth (two women)
and the children of the moon (man and woman)
attached at the back

Now before you get all
sapiosexual
on me, I don’t know this from Plato

I know this from Hedwig and the Angry Inch

N E WAYS, so yeah at one point
the three sexes were whole
round balls
adherent to each
other attached at the back and spinning

in their own orbit.

The problem
was people

GUNMAN FIRST INTO OKLAHOMA CITY RESTAURANT

were too content in self-possession

there was no ambition no thrill of the chase
no colonalism. So the gods split
the people down the back
and ever since we’ve been looking
for our other
half

Lonely as a kind of math.

Notice the news headline in bold which Pico slips into key parts of the poem. Even though Feed was written and published in 2019, the topics he chooses are still highly sensitive and relevant in the age of Covid, corrupt government and Black Lives Matter.

The poet’s loneliness stems not only from his never ending quest for a fulfilling relationship but also from his heritage as a Native American. He oftentimes talks about the sad and tragic abuse of his tribe, the Kumeyaay Indians, throughout American history. Not surprisingly, cooking and eating with his friends and boyfriends is a common occurrence in Feed, and his lack of a culinary archive in his heritage is a sad and poignant commentary on the history of his tribe. Oftentimes he speaks directly to his readers in missives:

Dear reader,

A roux, I’ve learned tonight in this mid city dinner party apartment
tucked somewhat safely away from asthmatic LA freeways, is the
mixture of butter and flour used to swell sauces and soups and Paul’s
baked sage mac n cheese that I’m whisking alive like an al dente
Evanescence cheese-rock bop. Whistle while you whisk away the rage
scrunched in yr boulders. I says to them around the table I says—

I don’t have a food history.

If the dish is, “subjugate an indigenous population,” here’s an
ingredient of the roux: alienate us from our traditional ways of
gathering and cooking food.

Kumeyaays moved around what ed be called San Diego County with
the seasons. The mountains, the valleys, the coast. Not much arable
land or big game so we followed the food wherever it would go.

Then the missions. Then isolated reservations on stone mountains
where not even a goat could live. Then the starvation. Then the
Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations. Whatever the
military would throw away came canned in the backs of trucks. The
commodities. The powered mil, worms in the oatmeal, corn syrupy
canned peaches. Food stripped of its nutrients. Then came the sugar
blood. the sickness. The glucose meter goes up and up and up.

I says to them around the table I says, I don’t have food stories. With
you, I say, I’m cooking new ones.

This passage is an excellent example of how Pico mixes the melancholy with the hopeful. And he throws in one of his signature witty phrases “I says to them” for just the slightest touch of humor. A constant friends that appears several times throughout the poem is a woman he calls Wilkes with whom he has an ongoing series of conversations about the galaxies:

Me: It’s like, against the infinity of space and all those stars and all
those worlds out there, the probability of extraterrestrial civilizations
other than us is extremely high. But where are they? Even if
interstellar travel is really slow, our sun is relatively young compared to
the age of the universe as a whole. They’d have had millions of years
to get here.
Wilkes: I think it’s paternalistic to assume we’d be demonstrably visited
in our lifetimes. History basicall just started recording itself. They
could have come a million years ago and been like, this rock is trash!

I stayed up yesterday past 2 a.m. reading Feed because I just could not put it down. His topics are timely but, despite the many hardships and obstacles in his life, Pico also has a sense of humor and an optimism that I found I really needed right now.

Feed is one book in a tetralogy of poems that Pico has written and published with Tin House Books and I am eagerly looking forward to reading all four titles.

Finally as an added bonus I made a playlist on Spotify with all of the songs on Teebs’s soundtrack from Feed.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1v75Eq6lFcrPWGRnQOdNQd?si=2G0FRLj5RPeefja7mCxcVA