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i am pandering to the points that i want
on the eve of Jupiter entering Venus and whatnot
and comparing it to what i really need,

as i loiter in my Mazda where you can usually find me
doing one of the following
rhymed list of things:

being alone,
playing Klondike on my phone;

listening to a CD on my SUV’s player
from my stack of self-burned music CDs,
all of which i’ve heard before;

and wet-lipping a big ol’ blunt just for me.
i know you’re all joking about my masturbating in the back seat.

maybe now that i’ve brought it up.


i don’t really know anything.
i blow the smoke out and i ponder my fatty
while i cough uncontrollably like i’m acting on TV:
telegraphing it for everyone in the audience to see
that it is, in fact, ground marijuana leaf.
if you priced this thing out it would be a killing,
but i don’t have the start-up to buy a booty-babe
to do all that tedious rolling.

i forgot where i was going


so i drift for a moment,
and in that space, she wanders through
in a special guest cameo i can’t mentally defer.


i know that i shouldn’t be driving

but my Saturday is also New PlayStation Deal Day –
as nutritional as breakfast cereal
and modestly-priced as Extra Foods –
and i wasn’t paying interest on my credit card
for a bill that, with tax, costs only two-oh-seven

so now i’m in the parking lot of the Seven-Eleven
with my twenty-five-dollar cardboard voucher
filling up to the tip of my breast pocket,
and the rain clouds from my last week of work
have parted
as a plane flies against a wild blue heaven
and you’d think i’d be running home


and so

because it is calm

i think about her again,
and the clouds loop back like a Terry Fox race.
i guess they were blowing back this way eventually,

anyway.

there’s a man in a van right behind where i’m idling.
i can’t see his face in my side-mirror but
i know he’s there because i looked when i exited the building.
his driver’s side window is rolled way down,
and i couldn’t help looking
because he’s rambling incoherently,
yelling back at someone over the wafer-thin microphone that he’s handling.
how gracious of the person on the other end of that line
to share his time with this drag.

i know that i should be happy i talk to my brother more
and he’s never called this much before,
but it’s his “i want to kill this guy and i want to kill that guy”
that should make me careful what i wish for.

what i want to do is talk to her more


but she is resisting
and it’s been over ten years and i still can’t tell
if we’re on the same path
or diverging.
my longing seems urgently tied to my aging.

i lie awake in the nighttime with my eyes closed just considering
and sometimes in the daytime in the passenger seat
so i can ignore the way my spouse is driving.
my own mental vacuity is a restfulness all-consuming
and considering other scenarios is the ultimate wheel-spinning –
even more so than buying more games
when i already have a loaded backlog to play,
not to mention the hours i spend writing:
if not for an audience, then just as cheap therapy.

i try to ash out but i’m thoroughly done.
i lose the grip between my index & thumb
and i drop the rest of my smoke on the floor.

i roll my eyes and i open the car door
and i get out and i heave and i fo and i shout
to myself

and then i lean over to take a look
and my sunglasses in wooden frames slide off my ears
onto the semi-wet pavement.
i pick them up and put them in their pouch and push the seat back
and feel around the cack –
that’s not a joint, that’s a french fry.
it’s not smouldering, so why am i bothering?
i know that i should be more grateful,
but why does everything i want have to be such a trial?

i fumbled for the knife in my pocket at work
three fucking times before i dropped it.
there was no radio on the loudspeaker that morning
so the impact made a racket.
all i was trying to do was cut the wrap off this cheap fucking piece-of-shit pallet,

but i can’t stop re-regretting i didn’t take more chances when i was younger
before i suddenly became a career shelf-stocker
thirteen years after i applied,
dropping a second post-sec degree on the side.
i know that i should take this job more seriously
if it is to be the way that i make my money,
but i’d need to sober up, take more shifts,
make my intentions known,
and then what happens to those old dreams
everyone vicariously had me living for?
my ego is still welted but you can’t see the bruises anymore.

i’m wondering if the woman i work next to,
on the other end of that text history, too,
the one i’ve slept next to for four-thousand days
and the ones occupying the spaces
are thinking the same things i do.
probably not, my wife says to me,
and so i try to believe
because to say yes would mean to carry that lot around with me
with nothing i could do.
she tells me not everyone is like that.
but when there are billions of people on this planet,
you can’t tell me there isn’t one other one.


i know that i should hold my wife more.

once she was just a cameo, too, and,
like Carson, i gave her the OK and called her to the couch.
now it’s our twelfth season together
and the indent on the closest seat is her’s.
there’s two more spots
waiting empty
next door.

one is probably meant for my brother.
the other nobody said was tied to a gender
or even a species.
maybe it’s for a puppy.

//wd 5.30.2024

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