-Twenty-seven alarm clocks in these walls.
It’s a good life. It’s a godsend with a breakfast buffet
that all of them rarely sing at the same nondescript midnight.

-I paid a lot for this life. Seven dimes here. A few hundred dollars
worth of travel accessories and season passes there. It added up quickly.
No one died, but I’m alone with thousands of new friends all the same.

-It’s a good life. For a better one,
I look for you at the bottom of the stairs all the time.

Maybe someday, but you know what they say,
life and when it happens.
It's a lot of pressure for the lonely, someone else's
better life.

I'm still scraping away at this damn ceiling here
trying for my own.
All it's going to cost is my living warmth,
maybe some broken nails and bloody knuckles,
and what good will I be to you then?

-I make my own judgment calls. I can tie my own shoes,
escape from ambulances in mid-religious conversation,
and choose to break down crying at any countdown
of all the terrible things I’ve done this past decade.

-You need to keep this in mind. I’m coming up the street
to your building because it’s necessary to my well-being.
It’s not a question of giving up stealing other people’s laundry,
in order to try and tell you one more time how I feel about things.

-Not a single one of these seventy-five footsteps
to your burn notice front door contains a single one
of the nine thousand elements that makes up doubt.

-I paid a lot for this life. I chose to.

I suppose I could continue to pretend
there’s a one-way street here;
it’s the expected reaction of
Girls-Like-Me
everywhere.

If you can forgive my deceptive strength
and the way I never use it
behind closed doors,
I can deal with second-hand smoke
and gritty wax of the poetic variety
from a man almost, but not quite entirely broken.

If you let me break on you
again and again,
I will take you into me and hold you at
‘almost’.

If I let you in, I might collapse,
just lock the door behind you.

-It gets weird from here.
It gets back to expectations.
It gets back to things that are confusing,
even infuriating to those of us who love
our tropes like the brothers and sisters
of that one great winter from our best compilation
of the old days.

-I will spend all types of time with you.
I will learn between dreams and getting fat.
I will be fearless,
particularly when it’s not convenient to be that way.

-And I will trust you to love me,
even when you can barely stand the arguments.

01/26/2016

Author's Note: Writers block and rust stand no chance against Mr. Ricard, though I'm struggling more than ever to keep up now.

Posted on 01/27/2016
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