prophecy aligned
an exile of my design
retired hurt, alive
social anxiety
self check out
get a proper job!
stop stewing in your own juice
as mom used to say
miss|understanding
please write about love
fear is my intimacy
fledgling leaving nest
simmer
for forty years
duck soup; don’t talk to me
i won’t talk to you
me/me
i am a vector of awkward
a butter fingered samurai
a saturnine oaf
i kicked grace in the face
once, by mistake
i was aiming for hope
i carry with me dis-ease
contaminating conversation
since nineteen eighty three
custerd (iii)
how chromatic of me
to be jaundiced and jaded
all at once
placing finger after finger
scaling jesus’ and jacob’s
crackers if you think about it
when all my life i’ve been
in an abysmal fissure
trapped between not being
brave enough to engage with my life
and not being brave enough
to pull the trigger
anxiety (population: 1)
fire up the tom tom
we’re going on tour
to social anxiety
although meeting one tom
sounds bad enough
i’ll guess we’ll have to wait and see
there’s a certain topography
to the antisocial condition
an endless undulation
of potential encounters
barren swathes of awkward
conversation and giant
forests of fallen redwood
each one a chance for emancipation
fathomless black lakes
of crude advances and
hot white hourglass sand
the roads are capillaries
trailing to smut
but a path to acceptance
survives
of you-as-you
and me-as-me
