HEY INTERNET,

I have things to say to you, I guess! In due time. For now, I got you this:

I’d buy you a drink

if I wasn’t eighteen

if you weren’t married

and dead—

even though,

very often,

you wrote of these starry-eyed,

long-legged, alive young things

with copies of your books,

heads full of fantasy, bad poetry

and not much else,

offering themselves up for the taking

and most times you took them

but didn’t like it,

or were indifferent—

we would have been better than all that.

maybe. we would have finally freed ourselves

from the bars, the back alleys,

the debt, the three-night-straight drunks,

the work day

and the tongue ties

and the weight of passing time

and maybe you could have let

that little bird

out of your chest.

lately, dear, I go to parties

when I am bidden to do so

and I let the other girls have the

flesh and blood of their men—

their boys, really, who are so young and

full of their manhood and

not much else—

to caress and, eventually, tear apart

limb from limb;

the only thing that I’ve found to endure

at the ugly hour of three in the morning

is this longing to have

drawn breath in the same

small, small point in time as you did,

to have been there,

just to touch your hand

maybe

rub your back

even

or sit in the corner together

drinks in hand

and

not say anything at all, just

watch the fakers fake,

and the liars lie,

and the smoke rise into the air

all still and shimmering,

curving upwards, into itself,

into nothing.

even though

when you get right down to it

I’m holding a flame for a man

three times my age,

for a man who would have set my dear old mother to

tearing out her hair and rending her clothes,

a man whose touch is as substantial as paper,

whose touch is paper, terribly thin and cold under my

searching fingertips—

I lay myself down in this little room,

every inch of me weary and well-traveled,

and in the bed where a thousand strangers

have been crying and fucking and praying,

talking and dreaming and waking,

I take my place among them.

I wrap myself in your pages

like a lover’s arms,

like armor,

and finally

sleep.