Second Floor, at the Bar

In a place that won’t do, you notice
too much. The sun makes you take
big gulps and too soon the voice you hear
cecomes rounded at the edges, effluvial.
There is not enough, and there is too much
and always there is also neither.
You want there always to be neither
and both, and you want things you say
to be true for a day, and on that day
yhey will also have been true forever,
but you have only enough conviction
with which to stand in the shade,
wishing for life to give you smaller portions.

The night cracked open, and the yoke bowed.
I had brined it, but the jar was brittle
and impatient. It was hard to understand
at that moment how the moon would inspire
anyone to do anything, and I saw
in your eyes that only I was impervious.
It was such a deliberate message conveyed
wordlessly – not “you feel impervious
And I don’t,” but “you are the only one
who feels the way you do.” Looking around
for confirmation, I realized the message
must be printed on the inside of my irises
and that the salty yolk of the moon
was projecting it in sepia, a portrait
of thoughts too stupid to be thought,
the only ones I seem to able to hold anymore.

We always say morning “breaks,”
but only people who don’t see sunrises
talk that way. When have you stayed up till dawn
and thought that you had witnessed something breaking?
I guess when you have pieces scattered all around
because nothing fits anymore, you get a pass,
you get to say morning has “broken”
but we will silently critique your lack of specificity.

Why are we even capable of saying things
that we wouldn’t believe ourselves capable of saying
a few short hours later? Why are we able to
think anything that won’t be true for longer
than a day? We must either enjoy
passing time that way, or we must not know better.
It is enough to make me see how nothing
is anything, and how some things are everything,
and even then how every dream or trim sentence
is also about the loneliness and impossibility of it all.