I just wanna be better.

And you see it sometimes…
someone gives someone a swipe to the metro and
the whole bar contributes to getting the navy drunk on fleet week. We don’t have happiness here so at least we can give alcohol.
You can find opportunity to be good or you can wait for your rottenness to be exposed,
skidding by on thin ice seeing how far it’ll take you.

Is your head as beautiful as your face?

There are problems that I never solved,
I abandoned them.
I was the only doctor, diving into a river of piranhas.
Some wounds I patched up but I had to run,
left the needle in, stitches half done.

My coworker was on the subway,
then two men began to spit on him and call him an alien.
They punched him, threw their weight behind their limbs which they flung in his direction, a senseless snow storm.
He fought back but he missed, his fingers hit the pole and they snapped.
So he couldn’t go to work, holding so many plates at a time up and down the stairs.
By the time he recovered his job had forgotten him, found someone unbroken, so he was screwed.

All it takes is a moment.
A space where you hesitate and feel the beats go by like if this was a song and not a poem,
an opera and not a waiting room.
Good and evil and all that jazz but regardless,
all it takes is a moment.

There are no velvet curtains drawn open indicating the beginning.
The opening grace note is the sun as it beams into our faces, ugly and straining.
Do you get used to it? Do you still squint?
Does it still blind you as your feet hit the ground and you didn’t make a plan? You’re an earthworm, bloated on the sidewalk in the rain.
Most of it goes on this way dragging and moaning and our hearts die when we grow up.

But sometimes when we slow dance, I exhale the shadows.
I am a stick figure made of shimmering things you buy at the dollar store, pieces of tinsel crows collect.

promise this life is more than just red and white
and making it through the night.

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