That university up the street
is a dangerous place to wake up.

The library is a thousand years old,
and has seen more knife fights
than a gas station with lottery tickets
inside the soup cans.

I guess it’s just a good place
to know you have a better chance
of getting away with murder
than you do finding a book
with all the pages right where they ought to be.

Some of the girls who hang around here?
I don’t even think they’re students.

I don’t talk to them when I’m thinking clearly.
I don’t find solace in their screwdriver fingers,
wait to see if they even exist in the city
or ask them for three years of marriage,
in exchange for twenty years of coughing and depression.

I used to breathe in what I read.
Every word was the history of two universes trading limbs.
I made money babysitting other people’s laundry
and scaring their kids away from taking too many pills.

I never met these kids. I just assumed that someone,
somewhere was grateful,
from the way they sent me money
even though it wasn’t my birthday.

The cards they sent were always kind,
for every occasion,
and I’d leave them between the books,
or in the hands of people who didn’t need
a lot of encouragement to think I was nuts.

Save up a year’s worth,
leave them all over town
and hope someone at least thinks
random acts of kindness are still quaint.

It pays for the bad things I do.
Those women in leather boots have brought down
some of the greatest thinkers of our time. I don’t stand
a chance of being anything but a walking fat lip.

Goddamn kids are actually goddamn midgets
with weird eyes, huge foreheads and big knives.

We all saw that movie. You shouldn’t chase anything
in a yellow raincoat,
and you shouldn’t imagine that someone who has been
missing from your heart for years just happened to forget
you existed for a decade.

I don’t go after anyone anymore. I just meet people.
That has both good and bad consequences.

You wouldn’t believe the unintentional journalists I’ve met.
The rock star fellas who have taken my picture
on the back of a red truck.

The aging vampires who smile knowingly,
and shake my hand when I tell them my name.

12/03/2011

Posted on 12/03/2011
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