be alone

“Let me die in my footsteps
before I go down under the ground.”

Well, this is the place to meet people, is it not? I have spent plenty of time conversing with people and attempting communication. But I must say even the most trained are terrible at conversing in a bar setting. First, it seems to be a competition to see who can assume the most about the other in three words or less, fatally poetic. But at the same time, treating everyone like an unindividual, as if everyone in a bar is a bland, lifeless piece of crepe. Secondly, I see no difference in going to a bar alone as going to a bar in a pack of noncommunicators or empty communicators, or a bunch of robots who spit bro, dude, and like or automatons that only look up at what shines.

Yes, this place is definitely a suspect for the murder of poetry.

Something about talking
to people from home
makes me realize
I’m the prince and the fool,
between the youth of hometown success
and the wisdom of social failure.

But success is always distant
next to the pangs of the present
silence. I, the mirror.
I am a single Jude
with distant cousins. I
am the cloud of obscurity,
a homesickness, a mouse knawing
wood in a hollow home beside
an aloof shadow working against
the stage of a nightlight.

so I duct tape
myself back together again
and again and again.

Place it across my heart
and soul and gift wrap my
pride to give away to you

watching me like a movie
with your television eyes.
I am a fool and a

mummy and a donor, opening
myself and transfusing my blood
on paper. I am dying but will not

refuse the red from my wounds.

sometimes, I look through the bottom of my pint glass into the bar tender who is moving back and forth, and sometimes, I look into the alley where a man puts a double-barrel shotgun on my chest and fires unto it like a release of energy. I smile and run my fingers over my wounds. I run my fingers over the roughness and notice how it feels like everything. And the darkness is my canvas as I smear the blood into the ocean of the night and humidity. Like everything, I can feel the lip of the scar and the lacerated rhythms that made their way through to my heart and beyond that shallow fountain. I can feel the brush of ideas and sentiment before they settle into Gravity, my silent pallbearer.

I’ve missed you

while we’ve been on vacation.

Want to come home soon.

I’ll be back soon.

I’ll be back tonight.

and be social with books
and dance with music
until I am surrounded
with legions of words
that I champion as maestro