The Day I Was Born

Maybe it doesn't matter, but maybe I wish that it did.

Traffic trickles in clumsy patterns below the main room window.

The colors are careless and clouded. 

There's something so strange to me about the way a bar looks in the morning-

It's basic structure exactly the same, the stools in place and the tile swept up.

But something in its bones is so utterly misplaced,

a shell of its own scene.

You're still asleep and I am cupping a margarita glass up to the light,

observing the cold curvature of neon-

A string of faces close to the concrete are like the beads of a rosary

A prayer that I haven't yet heard enough to repeat.

My lips curl into motion and then recoil.

Today is the day I was born,

years ago in the dead hours of the night,

and the date repeats itself again

in montages and dusty flashes of the mind.

A cracking cone of light beneath your front door.

A lazy morning song of headaches and dehydration.

You kissed me and you told me not to care.

But you're my friend and he's my friend and the two of you

are best fucking friends.

And I don't understand what you mean when you speak to me,

when you coat me in your blue covers and shiver into the lines of my chest.

So it doesn't matter- so none of this matters-

Here, let's all swim together in one big pool of our own chemicals.

Let's jump from bedroom to bedroom, like superheroes

ascending buildings in the midst of a sleeping city.

Let's kiss everything and love nothing at all.

If it doesn't matter, then tear it all down. 

This room and this street and that bar outside your window.

Hand it all to me in crumbs and pieces

and show me it can be devoured.

Because I don't want to do this again,

I don't want to pick up shells and pretend that they don't make me sad.

Just because something can be both created and destroyed,

doesn't mean the acts are the same.