friend on the phone

‘Afraid I’m not gonna figure it out,’

I would say to my friend on the phone.

What I would tell him probably would be

something like,

“It’s kind of like a forbidden romance.

I loved it, it loved me back, and our love was perfect;

but it was what everyone else thought we should be that ruined it

that made these impossible demands.

And now it’s too late,

I abandoned it, this is why it no longer touches me,

plays with my hair, holds me at night,

because I left it when I left there.”

And probably, “And now here I am,

here I am

everything around me is different,

and I am different, I know because I barely recognize

that person in those pictures,

except for the one lingering thing, that long string

of hatred strung from my own lungs around my throat.

I’m afraid I’ll never figure this out.

What should I do with my time?

I make enough to eat and enjoy a few things,

but the unhappiness caused by making enough to eat and enjoy a few things

during that time, what I am, all I am is unhappiness.

Follow your love,

do honest work,

miserable, irresponsible lies.

What should I do? What should I do

today while I am?

Because, I mean, I believe

that I am what I do,

that my life is how I feel

now, and every time that is now,

so that if I work hard for some end

but am weeping all through the hard work

what I am, even if I do manage to succeed in the end,

what I am is tears.

What I am is tears-

only that.

If a bus hits me while I’m weeping,

all I was is tears.

Man, I don’t know

except that the people around me

I want to make happy

and the time by myself

is filled with so much color and cold blue steel of feeling

and the pain of that steel piercing my stomach

is the pinpoint of a burning reality

like the focus of a magnifying glass under the sun.

Man, I don’t know

how best to deal with the love I feel for the people around me

or the exuberance of the colors

and especially not the urgency of that cold blue steel I feel,

the urgency of the hard, sharp syringe-like center of being-

what to do with that,

because I guess all in all that’s 

all I care about.”

I’d say to my friend on the phone.