the grass doesn’t look any greener,
I confess,
	but I think I’ll hop fence
	       I think I’ll slow down
		    hide my face,
 		    muffle the complacent
		                 sounds.
	the scaffolding here can’t hold us
		now
          we’re fostering support
                     without preparing for the floor
                             to give out.
     and I’ll pace!
         and I’ll pace!
             and I’ll pace!
     and I’ll wear the spots where
		I want the wear;
	tear at the walls until
	they’re drywall-bare—

Sometimes life is so infuriating and it comes to haunt you in sidewalk playing cards and mid-morning poker chips
                                 and you’d think it might get easier with years to read the signs
                                                                             —between the lines—
                                 but it’s never any easier to relieve these suggestive fears.
The world, it’s tilting. It’s going too fast.
The days are too tiring, too uncomfortable.
Too tight. Too big. 

   and aren’t you insulted?
           aren’t you going to cry?
           aren’t you going to make a scene?

   and
   aren’t
   I
   ashamed?

A lot of things happened.
	Have happened.
	Are happening.
The goal is to find the good-enoughs, but when they’re all so far away it’s so easy to fall through the fingers of the--
       Coltish-young things keep cowed contact and still,
                       I’m remissive,
                              unconditional,
                                        and fully functional,
           though  admittedly somewhat rusted.
      It takes a real kick in the chest,
                    a not entirely literal
                        strike of the heart
         to instill the sort of distraught,
distrust, distaste for
you:
famished, forgiving, faithful:
	you are all my lions

          I’m pretty sure, I’m sure of it:
the grass doesn’t look any greener,
               but I think I’ll sleep with my truth
                              in the weeds.

Paul: You know what wrong with you, Miss Whoever-You-Are? You’re chicken. You got no guts. You’re afraid to say, “Okay, life’s fact.” People do fall in love. People do belong to each other, because that’s the only chance anybody’s got for real happiness. You call yourself a free spirit, a wild thing. You’re terrified somebody’s going to stick you in a cage. Well baby, you’re already in the cage. You built it yourself. And it’s not bounded by tulip, Texas, or Somaliland. It’s wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.

My head is running in circles anymore. It’s hard to talk without blushing. Becoming flustered. Life seems to be too fast, too slow. I haven’t taken the time to document it. I haven’t been able to. Work it out. The feelings don’t make sense until I write them, then they rise to the surface like welts.

I’ve been begging my fingers to allow me to write, but you know how the words are. Fickle. They either don’t appear at all or they scuttle around like wild animals that are so fucking hard to catch. Books are like zoos. Let someone else do all the hard and dangerous work, make it look real pretty, feed those wild creatures, train them, and put them on display. I’ll try not to knock on the glass, but sometimes I just can’t help myself.

I am word constipated and exhausted in a very unfamiliar way and I’m not sure exactly where I stand in this self I relish in so much most days.

I’ve been wrestling with the idea of regret. Sometimes it’s just that, an idea; something to consider. Other times it’s a religion, and you’ve got to just repent and repent and question and repent some more. I am at least choosing my paths, and even though they may lead to some shitty places, I’m still not just stuck on a crossroad waiting for someone else to tell me which way to go. I feel no remorse for being born as this person. There’s no shame in who I am. I’m too old to hate myself and I’m too young yet to be giving this so much thought.

It’s cold. It’s getting colder.

There’s certainly a wintery chill in the air, but I feel like the season is stalling. The air is cold but healthy, and the paces have quickened but without any real sense of purpose. Something like fear or nervousness propels people forward until their bodies find a place to settle; they just want to go and go and go until they find some comfortable space to occupy.

This winter’s muse has been lazy, friends. Lazy and inaccessible. This is the time of year when one is supposed to be sticking his foot in through my window or door or eyes or ears and saying something terribly witty and despairing.

It could certainly be said that he handled her with care when care was called for, and otherwise moved her with a forceful knowledge that left love bruises on her hips and shoulders. He was patient and playful, knew to lay low on days she, undermining her own sense of forced maturity, threw hollowed angry down hallways and up stairs.

Heart hobbled and weary, she would always, eventually, apologize.

And he’d answer simply, “well, this happens.”

He was suddenly so abashed, so lonely; he cried outside her door until she let him in, the poor thing. Finally— sleepily, she let him in and his paws padded quickly across the rug and landed, with a soft thud, on the bed, where he waited for her to lay back down. She did, of course, and like a child who had just awoke from a nightmare he curled up close to her and she cooed and caressed him back to sleep.

While choice grandiosity was certainly his hallmark, he considered himself pathologically down to earth and chronically on the wrong end of nonsensical betrayal. His idealization of romance stood in almost constant juxtaposition with his contemptuous disregard for dating and other delicate, lady-related activities. Moreover, his few female friends were occasionally targets of subtle derision as he sought to establish a sort of lasting control in order to counter the shame and fear triggered by his otherwise shy and insecure demeanor.

He’d been in love once, sure. A baroque, lumbering sort of love; one which suffered many frayed edges and so much patchwork he’d eventually lost sight of the girl he’d originally fallen for.
Or had she lost sight of him?

Let it be said that surrogate love, however gallantly sought, is an elusive and often disappointing endeavor. He’d found this out the hard way over many, many years of heart and headache.

So, he’d given up.
He’d been the one to leave, anyway, right?
Hadn’t he?

Regardless of his current and crushing loneliness’, he was successful at least at sustaining his own sense of personal fragmentation and this kept him from, most of the time, falling to literal pieces. Every so often, though, he’d wake up inhuman and devalued and spend an hour or so willing himself to the other side of the bed, to his phone, just to call in sick, so sick, to work. These days plagued him more often in the winter, when the days grew shorter and the sunlight that warmed his eyelids and roused him most mornings grew cold and lazy and old.

Today—that day—that Tuesday—that cold, wet, dreary Tuesday—was one of those days.

He thought of her often, but didn’t miss her because he knew that she knew he needed this. Deserved this, even.

Didn’t he?